Getting PulseAudio to cooperate

[Fitzcarraldo]

You can translate it if you want, albfneto, but please note that I am no expert in PulseAudio and it is likely that the PulseAudio 'sources' and 'sinks' I have used are not the ones that are supposed to be used, but just happen to work for me. If I had more time I would study PulseAudio and find out how it is supposed to work and how it should be configured correctly. Apparently the latest release of Ubuntu is the first time that Canonical has managed to configure it completely correctly, so an 'amateur' such as myself has little chance of grasping PulseAudio properly. That said, I'm beginning to suspect that a lot of Linux audio problems are being blamed on PulseAudio when there are other causes, i.e. it has become the 'whipping boy' of Linux.

[albfneto]

yes do.
i'm a member of the Sabayon Mania site, the Sabayon mania forum, Italy, and in min systems, multiple boot... i dont had the problems in Sabayon, neither in Gentoo-Funtoo, bu i had in Mandriva....!
the "sound" is not auto detected.... the message said...!automatically switched to pulseaudio, but no sound, but your procedure, usinfg the equivalent RPM packages for mandriva, "repaired" my problem in Mandriva's sound!
for this, i translated your procedure, and i cited and linked you as author, in the site Sabayon Mania.
Another thing. i'm impressed with your knowledge of languages! English, Spanish,Portuguese, French, Italian!...
Me also, but, Portuguese is well, but the other languages are only "so-so" knowledge!!
I write some English, some Italian, some French and i only read and understand Spanish and German, but not speak or write Spanish or German
Is you British?

[Fitzcarraldo]

Half British, half Brazilian, albfneto but have lived and/or worked in quite a few countries. I only speak English, Portuguese and Spanish well; the others are, as you say, so-so. But if one speaks a Latin-based language, it's not that difficult to pick up a little of another Latin-based language. And with on-line dictionaries and conjugation tools available, it's not difficult to correct one's rough attempts.

[E.M.G.]

Fitzcarraldo ... when trying to follow this post about pulse I get this error when trying to run padevchooser:

** (padevchooser:7620): WARNING **: pa_browser_new() failed.

same error when trying padevchooser --debug .... any ideas ??

[Fitzcarraldo]

Unfortunately not, E.M.G. as it works fine here. I googled your error message and came up with the following Ubuntu old bug report ** (padevchooser:9053): WARNING **: pa_browser_new() failed. You could try doing what that suggests, namely:

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# /etc/init.d/avahi-daemon start

to see if it helps.


EDIT: Just noticed in the post Re: Sort of new user... that user dteam85 mentions the same error and confirms the fix I posted above. So it looks like a bug in SL 5.1. Therefore I'm assuming you've installed SL 5.1, E.M.G.? If you have, would you care to file a bug report ('Bugs' link at the top right of this page)? Thanks.

[E.M.G.]

Thanks Fitzcarraldo that fixed it ... padevchooser works fine ... I added avahi-daemon to the default run level so now I just need to workout the frostwire error ... again thanks Should I still file the bug report even though there is a fix for it?

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# rc-update add avahi-daemon default

[Fitzcarraldo]

Please, if you wouldn't mind. That way the developers will definitely be informed and it will be on the official 'to do' list.

[E.M.G.]

No problem, submitted as Bug 1105

[Fitzcarraldo]

For some reason, today the KDE Notification Applet on the Panel started telling me that PulseAudio was not working. When I tried to launch PulseAudio Volume Control a window popped-up with the error message:

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Connection failed: Connection refused

PulseAudio had apparently stopped working (although audio in all my mutimedia applications -- including XBMC -- was still working fine as SL had fallen back to using ALSA.

During my investigations into the problem I noticed that the package paman had been removed from Portage, and that the PulseAudio Web site says PulseAudio Manager (paman) and the PulseAudio Device Chooser (padevchooser) are now both obsolete. However, I noticed that padevchooser is still in Portage. So I decided to uninstall paman but left padevchooser for the time being.

Anyway, then I looked at which version of PulseAudio was installed on my laptop:

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# eix -I pulse
[U] media-plugins/gst-plugins-pulse
     Available versions:  (0.10) 0.10.14!t 0.10.16!t (~)0.10.17!t
     Installed versions:  0.10.16(0.10)!t(17:42:09 07/11/09)
     Homepage:            http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/
     Description:         GStreamer plugin for the PulseAudio sound server

[U] media-sound/pulseaudio
     Available versions:  [m]0.9.15-r2 0.9.19 (~)0.9.19-r50 (~)0.9.21 (~)0.9.21-r50 **9999[1] {(+)X (+)alsa (+)asyncns avahi bluetooth (+)caps dbus doc +glib gnome hal ipv6 jack libsamplerate lirc oss policykit tcpd test +udev}
     Installed versions:  0.9.19-r51(18:18:26 05/11/09)(X alsa asyncns avahi bluetooth caps dbus glib hal ipv6 jack tcpd udev -doc -gnome -libsamplerate -lirc -oss -test)
     Homepage:            http://www.pulseaudio.org/
     Description:         A networked sound server with an advanced plugin system

[1] "sabayon" /usr/local/portage/layman/sabayon

Found 2 matches.

As it was not the latest version, I installed (via Portage) the latest media-sound/pulseaudio and media-plugins/gst-plugins-pulse:

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# emerge --sync
layman -S
emerge -1v pulseaudio
emerge -1v gst-plugins-pulse pulseaudio

Portage wanted to rebuild some dependencies:

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Calculating dependencies... done!
[ebuild  N    ] dev-libs/libatomic_ops-1.2-r1  180 kB
[ebuild  N    ] dev-util/unifdef-1.23  61 kB         
[ebuild     U ] media-libs/gstreamer-0.10.25 [0.10.24] USE="nls -test" 2,975 kB
[ebuild     U ] media-sound/pulseaudio-0.9.21-r50 [0.9.19-r51] USE="X alsa asyncns avahi bluetooth caps dbus glib hal ipv6 jack tcpd udev -doc -gnome -libsamplerate -lirc (-oss) -test" 2,009 kB                                                                                                                                                                           
[ebuild     U ] media-libs/gst-plugins-base-0.10.25 [0.10.24] USE="nls -debug" 2,189 kB                                                                                               
[ebuild     U ] media-plugins/gst-plugins-pulse-0.10.17 [0.10.16] 2,610 kB                                                                                                           

Total: 6 packages (4 upgrades, 2 new), Size of downloads: 10,021 kB

so I let all those packages build.

At the end of the multi-package build, a message to update a couple of config files was displayed, so I updated them once I was satisfied the new versions were not going to overwrite anything I had changed in the past.

Then I rebooted.

No more audio error notifications from the Notification Applet: PulseAudio is working again on my laptop and I can launch PulseAudio Volume Control without problem.

Possibly one of the packages I installed earlier this week (can't recall what I did, now) must have caused the problem.

Anyway, if you come across the above-mentioned pop-up error window when you launch PulseAudio Volume Control, chances are that upgrading your PulseAudio packages to the latest versions will solve the problem. Stick to Entropy unless you really know what you're doing, or you may cause more problems. And if PulseAudio is working at the moment on your PC then there is absolutely no need to upgrade anything: if it ain't broken, don't fix it!

[Richlion]

So if my sound system is working in terms of basics (applications don't block each other), but once in a while I start an application - Amarok, VLC, Kaffeine and the sound system produces screechy/scratchy noises and I have to restart an application - how do we fix this?

From the length of this thread and number of fixes and hints I think the Pulseaudio developer should rethink his strategy, because we don't have to be all sound and Linux gurus. So far I don't know what is the benefit of having Pulseaudio. A month ago I initiated a discussion on the KDE forum and they said we should not use Pulseaudio with KDE, because KDE is designed to work with Phenon. The same responses I had on the Gentoo forum.

Regards,
Richard