Getting PulseAudio to cooperate

[Richlion]

I don't know why, but the scratchy noises stopped nagging me somehow.
Apart from the pulseaudio I completely disabled - Now everything is perfect.
And I have an Nvidia not Intel sound card.

Thanks for the hint though.
Regards,
Richard.

[Fitzcarraldo]

Richard,

Just to clarify, I believe the three items of advice from markbuntu that I quoted are mutually exclusive, i.e. only the first of his three tips relates specifically to Intel HDA controllers:

1) If you have an HDA-Intel device try turning up the PCM slider in the volume control. If PCM is set to 0 it makes the sound scratchy for some of those devices.

2) if your sound is scratchy or stuttering you can edit these lines in the file /etc/pulse/daemon.conf to look like this:

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default-fragments = 5
default-fragment-size =25

3)There are also some sound cards/chips that can only be fixed with an ALSA upgrade so you may want to consider that if this does not work for you.

Items 2 and 3 above relate to any manufacturer's audio controller, not just Intel HDA.

[Fitzcarraldo]

Just a note for those of you with hardware including HDMI Audio who are still having trouble:

My new laptop has the following audio hardware:

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# lspci | grep Audio
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset High Definition Audio (rev 05)
01:00.1 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc Redwood HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 5600 Series]

On the Configuration tab of the PulseAudio Volume Control application, I had to change the Profile of 'Redwood HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 5600] Series' to Off for audio to come out of the speakers (I left the Profile of 'Internal Audio' as 'Analog Stereo Duplex' as usual).

[denijane]

Hi guys!
My sounds works great with one significant exception. Well two if we count the not-working microphone. But the more important problem is that Mozilla steals the sound. If I try to play a video in youtube, not only I don't hear sound, but also I lose all the sounds and I have to restart. The only way around this is if I have amarok playing while I play the video. Then if I pause amarok, the sounds is not "stolen". But so far no pulseaudio trick managed to return the sound after Mozilla took it. The same goes for all the other browsers. They break the sound and nothing is able to return it.

If however I stream something from console with gst-launch, it's ok and the sounds remains working. Amarok and Smplayer also don't steal the sound. It's only web browsers! I have absolutely no idea what's the problem.

Here's the dmesg output.

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Jun 18 20:57:23 localhost sudo: denijane : TTY=pts/2 ; PWD=/home/denijane ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/usr/sbin/alsaconf
Jun 18 20:57:23 localhost /etc/init.d/alsasound[20432]: alsasound: unknown function `unload'
Jun 18 20:59:52 localhost pulseaudio[6789]: alsa-sink.c: Error opening PCM device front:0: Device or resource busy
Jun 18 20:59:52 localhost pulseaudio[6789]: alsa-sink.c: Error opening PCM device front:0: Device or resource busy
Jun 18 21:01:21 localhost pulseaudio[2757]: alsa-sink.c: ALSA woke us up to write new data to the device, but there was actually nothing to write!
Jun 18 21:01:21 localhost pulseaudio[2757]: alsa-sink.c: Most likely this is a bug in the ALSA driver 'snd_hda_intel'. Please report this issue to the ALSA developers.
Jun 18 21:01:21 localhost pulseaudio[2757]: alsa-sink.c: We were woken up with POLLOUT set -- however a subsequent snd_pcm_avail() returned 0 or another value < min_avail.
Jun 18 21:01:35 localhost sudo: denijane : TTY=pts/2 ; PWD=/home/denijane ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/usr/sbin/alsaconf
Jun 18 21:01:35 localhost /etc/init.d/alsasound[9017]: alsasound: unknown function `unload'


[Fitzcarraldo]

I don't have your problem, so can only speculate. Have you tried the fixes in the following thread?: Sabayon 5/Gnome/PulseAudio: flash plugin taking over audio.

EDIT: I'm assuming you have already gone through all the steps listed in earlier posts in this thread?

[denijane]

Well, I think i discovered part of the problem. It's that /dev/dsp has the wrong privileges. It had crw-r-r I think, but I' don't remember for sure. I gave it full permissions and it unblocked the sound. I'm not sure what are the optimal permissions though. I guess "crwxrwxrwx" is not the best or safest thing.

Also I think the permissions are reseted when I restart, so the problem remains, but at least now I know how to fix it without a restart. Still, no sound in Mozilla or Opera, only in Midori ( ). But it's better then none

P.S. Yeah, I tried most of the instructions I met here or anywhere. I haven't tried this though:

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1. Create the file /etc/env.d/99chromium and write in it: FLASH_ALSA_DEVICE=pulse
2. env-update
3. Either source /etc/profile or reboot.


Maybe I'll do it later today, just for the sport

[Fitzcarraldo]

If it is any help, here are the file privileges for /dev/dsp on my laptop on which PulseAudio works perfectly:

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# ls -la /dev/dsp
crw-rw----+ 1 root audio 14, 3 Jun 27 22:29 /dev/dsp

Regarding the environment variable, I don't have any file in /etc/env.d that sets an environment variable FLASH_ALSA_DEVICE, yet Flash works fine in the browsers I use (Firefox, Chromium and Konqueor) and also does not affect sound in other applications.

[denijane]

Well, those were mine permission also, but obviously, something is requiring different permissions and that's the problem. I have a permission problem also with Dolphin, it wouldn't mount my hards if I don't start it from konsole with "sudo Dolphin". That happened after my last KDE update I think. Don't know if the problems are connected, though.

I don't know what's the problem with my sound. Because I have it, it's working fine in all kind of players and so on. The problem comes from flash. We'll see if the situation will change with the env.d file. I haven't restarted for a long while, so maybe today will be the day

[diddlebug]

Is there a Gnome equivalent of KMix? That looks pretty nifty.

[Fitzcarraldo]

It's been a while since I used GNOME and I haven't got my pen drive with SL GNOME to hand, so hopefully a GNOME user will reply to you. Anyway, you could try GNOME AlsaMixer if you haven't got that installed already: Gnome-alsamixer.

By the way, now that you have sorted out your ALSA configuration, have you tried reverting to PulseAudio? You might find it works now that ALSA is working.