sound stops working on F10

[Genes MailLists]

  Sound is a bit quirky - sometimes i hear things sometimes I dont.

  Now it has stopped working - a reboot fixes it. I do see this in the
logs ...


   Jan  2 14:46:02 me pulseaudio[3227]: module-alsa-sink.c: ALSA woke us
up to write new d
ata to the device, but there was actually nothing to write! Most likely
this is an ALSA
driver bug. Please report this issue to the PulseAudio developers.

  Running F10, gnome, fully updated.

  Any suggestions how to make it come back without rebooting ??

   thanks!

[Tim]

On Fri, 2009-01-02 at 13:49 -0700, Phil Meyer wrote:
>  There are several apps, and used to be several more, that still do
> not
>  play nice with pulseaudio.
>
>  For me, pidgin was the biggest culprit until a recent update. 
Long ago, I switched its /playing sounds/ preference to run a particular
command, and I used the "paplay" one.  The paplay command is a
pulseaudio sound player, so it ought to work fine.

>  What happened for me, was that apps that professed support for 
>  pulseaudio, such as amarok, would spin and cause the pulseaudio daemon
>  to die at some random beep from pidgin.  Once the deamon died, CPU
>  usage returned to normal, but no more sound. 
Which wasn't their fault.  Pidgin had jammed up the audio system ahead
of them.  It wouldn't matter how nicely they used pulseaudio, if
something else has wedged the audio sub-system.  It wasn't those
applications failing, it was pulseaudio being unable to work.

>  Restarting pulseaudio always fixed it, but the occurrence was
> random;
>  5 minutes; two days? 
Yes, I'd noticed that pidgin's interference was somewhat unpredictable.
It may well be that it wasn't generating sound events, or that luck
would have it that nothing else was using the sound system at the same
time.

>  Since the update to pidgin-2.5.2-6.fc10.x86_64, those have stopped. 
I have the same version, but for Fedora 9.  I haven't tried going back
to letting it play sounds.  But I suspect it'd still foul up, as the
sound options still don't have an entry for using pulseaudio.  Unless,
of course, something else is pretending to be alsa or esd to pidgin, so
it really uses pulseaudio.

>  However, about the same time, we got an upgrade to amarok that I
> could
>  not tolerate.  I have since switched to rhythmbox, but it pauses at 
>  virtually all focus changes into or out of firefox and thunderbird.  I
>  suspect that compiz is still struggling with those two apps, as they
>  are difficult to move around the screen for me. 
I've found various sound players do that, and I wasn't using compiz.  It
seemed that they were too CPU intensive to do two things at once without
interfering with each other.  Only the simpler ones didn't hiccup.

-- 
[tim@localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.9-73.fc9.i686

Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.  I
read messages from the public lists.

[Phil Meyer]

Mail Lists wrote:
>    Sound is a bit quirky - sometimes i hear things sometimes I dont.
>
>    Now it has stopped working - a reboot fixes it. I do see this in the
>  logs ...
>
>
>     Jan  2 14:46:02 me pulseaudio[3227]: module-alsa-sink.c: ALSA woke us
>  up to write new d
>  ata to the device, but there was actually nothing to write! Most likely
>  this is an ALSA
>  driver bug. Please report this issue to the PulseAudio developers.
>
>    Running F10, gnome, fully updated.
>
>    Any suggestions how to make it come back without rebooting ??
>
>     thanks!
>
>
>     
There are several apps, and used to be several more, that still do not 
play nice with pulseaudio.

For me, pidgin was the biggest culprit until a recent update.

What happened for me, was that apps that professed support for 
pulseaudio, such as amarok, would spin and cause the pulseaudio daemon 
to die at some random beep from pidgin.  Once the deamon died, CPU usage 
returned to normal, but no more sound.

Restarting pulseaudio always fixed it, but the occurrence was random; 5 
minutes; two days?

Since the update to pidgin-2.5.2-6.fc10.x86_64, those have stopped. 

However, about the same time, we got an upgrade to amarok that I could 
not tolerate.  I have since switched to rhythmbox, but it pauses at 
virtually all focus changes into or out of firefox and thunderbird.  I 
suspect that compiz is still struggling with those two apps, as they are 
difficult to move around the screen for me.

But in any case, as Frank Cox has pointed out, the pulseaudio daemon is 
likely your issue, and can be restarted.


Good Luck!

[Frank Cox]

On Fri, 02 Jan 2009 14:55:05 -0500
Mail Lists wrote:

>  
>    Sound is a bit quirky - sometimes i hear things sometimes I dont.
>  
>    Now it has stopped working - a reboot fixes it. I do see this in the
>  logs ... 
I too occasionally lose my sound on Fedora 10.  The solution that I've found is
as follows.

First, use this command to find out if something is blocking the sound:

fuser -v /dev/snd/* /dev/dsp*

If you see a problem you can use a kill command to get rid of the task that's
causing the problem.

To restart pulseaudio use this command:

pulseaudio -k ; pulseaudio -D --log-target=syslog

This gets the sound back for me every time that I've lost it, so far anyway.





-- 
MELVILLE THEATRE ~ Melville Sask ~ http://www.melvilletheatre.com
DRY CLEANER BUSINESS FOR SALE ~ http://www.canadadrycleanerforsale.com

[Genes MailLists]

On 01/02/2009 02:55 PM, Mail Lists wrote:

>     Jan  2 14:46:02 me pulseaudio[3227]: module-alsa-sink.c: ALSA woke
> us
>  up to write new d
>  ata to the device, but there was actually nothing to write! Most likely
>  this is an ALSA
>  driver bug. Please report this issue to the PulseAudio developers. 
  Forgot to say:

     There are tons and tons of these messages ..

and lspci:
3)
00:1e.2 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation
82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 03)