Missing autoaudiosink

[sideburns]

My sister's using Ubuntu 10.0.4 (I'm her tech support.) and for the past several days has been unable to get sound to work on her desktop. She first noticed it on youtube videos, but we've tried other things and all sound is gone. She just let me know that the autoaudiosink element is missing. Alas, that's all I have from her email, or I'd give more details. What's the best way to get it back and maybe get her sound working again?

[Yellow Pasque]

The autoaudiosink is in the gstreamer0.10-plugins-good package. Sometimes, it doesn't work for some reason. You can usually get around this by manually specifying the sink (probably pulsesink) in gconf.

gconftool-2 --type string --set /system/gstreamer/0.10/default/audiosink pulsesink
gconftool-2 --type string --set /system/gstreamer/0.10/default/chataudiosink pulsesink
gconftool-2 --type string --set /system/gstreamer/0.10/default/musicaudiosink pulsesink

[Softa]

We tried your suggestion, but it didn't work. Reinstalling the package didn't do any good, either. Checking with a terminal, rhythmbox (used for testing) was still sitting in the background, hung but responded to kill -9.

[Yellow Pasque]

Hmm. I'm not sure what else to look for other than more detailed terminal output. Personally, I would install gstreamer dbg packages and start playing with gst-launch to see if I could find a more specific error, but that can get involved.

Anyway.. here's a free bump.

[sideburns]

Does Ubuntu use pulseaudio like Fedora does? If so, maybe that's what needs reinstalling.

[Yellow Pasque]

Does Ubuntu use pulseaudio like Fedora does?

Ever since Ubuntu 8.04/Hardy, Ubuntu uses pulseaudio by default.
First, try removing pulse's config files and restarting it:

cd ~/
rm -rf .pulse*
pulseaudio -k

[Softa]

when I ran the second command I got this in response:

E: main.c: Failed to kill daemon: No such process

And, when I tried to play an mp3, no sound. Sigh!

[Yellow Pasque]

So pulseaudio isn't running.. Did you remove it by chance?
What is the output when you try to start it in terminal?

pulseaudio --start -v

[Softa]

Same as before: the daemon failed to start. However,

ps aux | grep pulseaudio

showed that it was running, along with a helper.I killed it, tried again and it reported that it was able to start, but failed to do anything. We did, however, get a message that it couldn't find a plugin: Gstreamer autoaudiosink. And, I might add, DVDs don't play any more, not even the video. Don't know if it's related, but you never know.

[Yellow Pasque]

Hmm. Does gst-inspect see the sink?

sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-tools
gst-inspect-0.10 autoaudiosink

As a last resort, you may want to delete the gstreamer registry (rm .gstreamer-0.10/* ) and install the latest stable version of gstreamer from this PPA: https://launchpad.net/~gstreamer-dev...s/+archive/ppa