RS880 Audio Device (Radeon HD 4200) HDMI sound interface difficulties

[Gregory P. Ennis]

On Sun, Jan 1, 2012 at 1:09 PM, Gregory P. Ennis <PoMec at pomec.net> wrote:
> T.C.
>
> /etc/xdg/autostart/pulseaudio.desktop does exist and
>
> "Exec=start-pulseaudio-x11" is one of the line items of the file.

That's very weird.  I don't understand why it doesn't autostart.  You
should probably file a bug about this.

In the meantime try adding pulseaudio to your user-specific autostart
directory and see if that makes it go:
mkdir -p ~/.config/autostart
cp /etc/xdg/autostart/pulseaudio.desktop ~/.config/autostart/

> Sorry, I did not include the whole output of pacmd here it is :
> [snipped output]

For starters, both your regular audio and HDMI audio devices are
suspended.  That might be related to the fact that PulseAudio is
starting late; something else might be locking the ALSA device.  You
can try to un-suspend your audio devices by running:
pacmd suspend false

If that gives you some sort of error, you probably have to fix
pulseaudio autostarting first.

Now, lets forcibly play some sound through your HDMI audio.  If you
have amarok installed, this will work, or you can point it to any OGG
or WAV audio file (there are a bunch in /usr/share/sounds):
pacmd play-file /usr/share/kde4/apps/amarok/data/first_run_jingle.ogg 0

If that works, try playing some sound in a normal application and see
if your HDMI audio works then too.

If that doesn't work, change the 0 at the end of that command to a 1
and run it again.  If sound comes out of your laptop's internal
speakers, PulseAudio is working and it's just an HDMI problem.  If no
sound comes out of them, something is wrong with PulseAudio in general
(or possibly the file you tried to play doesn't exist or work).  If
you haven't sorted out the autostarting yet, that's probably related.

-T.C.
-------------------------------------------------------------

T.C.

For some reason pulseaudio is starting now.  I don't think my original
observation was wrong, but ...  Before I set up the .config/autstart in
the users account I did a reboot and when I logged in pulseaudio was
active. 

running 'pacmd suspend false' resulted in :
"Welcome to PulseAudio! Use "help" for usage information"

this did not stop the puluseaudio daemon.

I made sure the hdmi was selected in the output tab of the "Sound"
System settings as well as being selected in the Hardware tab.
After this I ran :

pacmd play-file /usr/share/kde4/apps/amarok/data/first_run_jingle.ogg 0

Which did not result in anything

Then I ran
pacmd play-file /usr/share/kde4/apps/amarok/data/first_run_jingle.ogg 1

Which resulted in playing the jingle on the laptop's speakers.

Thanks much for your debugging expertise.  Do you think it is time for
me to file a bug????

Greg