HOWTO: PulseAudio Fixes & System-Wide Equalizer Support

[citral]

Life saver guide this! Thanks a bunch. These steps should've been in Hardy by default.

[monstermudder78]

Thanks! I agree 100% with this guy^^^

[jukingeo]

I followed the procedure and unfortunately I am dead in the water (soundwise).

Prior to following the guide I mainly had trouble with streaming audio on the internet and Gens was working, but distorted.

Now after installation I have nothing, nada, iksnay.

[psyke83]

I followed the procedure and unfortunately I am dead in the water (soundwise).

Prior to following the guide I mainly had trouble with streaming audio on the internet and Gens was working, but distorted.

Now after installation I have nothing, nada, iksnay.

Follow Appendix 2, then.

[markbuntu]

Sorry you didn't get things working... I just hope you realize that there were uninstall instructions in my guide. If you try to use PulseAudio in the future and have issues with applications, the easiest thing to do is:

1. Install "padevchooser" (it will pull in other useful applications)
2. Open either the PulseAudio Manager or PulseAudio Volume Control, and look at the Client or Playback client list.

If an application that is currently playing sound is listed there, then it is using PulseAudio successfully. If an application is playing sound but not listed, then it's using ALSA directly, probably because you didn't follow this guide properly, or it's an OSS application and you forgot to use the "padsp" wrapper.

In the latter case, when an application is using ALSA directly, then PulseAudio will not be able to access the sound card and thus audio mixing will appear broken.

I followed your guide EXACTLY, every step of the way. All I know is that following it broke a lot of my stuff in the same manner as the last time I tried to get pulseaudio to work using a different guide. Luckily, I know how to recover to alsa in a quick and easy manner which I figured out the last time.

Besides, I really don't care what I use as long as it all "just works" and it didn't "just work" for me.

Maybe you should explain this padevchooser thing in the how to. Is it similar asoundconf-gtk?

Anyway, thanks for taking the time to do all this. And thanks for the new flash and libasound2. They seem to be a great improvement. I will probably give pulseaudio another go round in a few months because I would really like to see it working on my machine.

Cheers, and no hard feelings OK.

[sammydee]

Anybody struggling with surround sound in pulseaudio, or having problems with it, you should try this thread:

Howto: Surround sound in pulseaudio

If you have problems, post it there and we'll help you out

[psyke83]

Hi everyone,

I have made a major update to the guide, adding new instructions (as updated packages were uploaded to hardy-proposed) and giving some new troubleshooting information.

Users that followed the guide prior to v2.5 simply need to "downgrade" some Intrepid package versions to the hardy-proposed versions, to keep their system consistent:

$ sudo apt-get install libasound2/hardy-proposed libasound2-plugins/hardy-proposed libasound2-dev/hardy-proposed

[jukingeo]

Hi everyone,

I have made a major update to the guide, adding new instructions (as updated packages were uploaded to hardy-proposed) and giving some new troubleshooting information.

Users that followed the guide prior to v2.5 simply need to "downgrade" some Intrepid package versions to the hardy-proposed versions, to keep their system consistent:

$ sudo apt-get install libasound2/hardy-proposed libasound2-plugins/hardy-proposed libasound2-dev/hardy-proposed

Would this fix the "no sound" problem I am now having? I also now have Ubuntu Studio. Since I wanted it anyway I figured I would load it on now instead of getting everything fixed and then putting more things out of whack by loading it on afterwards.

[psyke83]

Would this fix the "no sound" problem I am now having? I also now have Ubuntu Studio. Since I wanted it anyway I figured I would load it on now instead of getting everything fixed and then putting more things out of whack by loading it on afterwards.

NO. If your system does not play any sounds, this guide will not help. You probably have a kernel or ALSA issue.

[jukingeo]

NO. If your system does not play any sounds, this guide will not help. You probably have a kernel or ALSA issue.

Ok, but if you backpedal a bit to a few posts ago, I followed you original guide to fixing the streaming audio on the internet and now I have NO sound because of that.

Prior to following your guide I HAD sound on most of my applications. Some applications had audio, but distortion as well. The internet audio/video was so choppy it was unusable. So that is why I followed your original procedure, but now I have no audio at all.

If it was a Kernel problem, last night I upgraded to Ubuntu Studio and that has the latest Kernel, but it is the RT kernel. I was hoping that would correct at least some issues, but alas, it hasn't.

I just need to know what to do to get my audio fully functional again.

I pretty much installed all the programs that I am going to work with (and I can run them down for you). So I would like to get them all going.

As a quick recap I am running a few console emulators (Stella, Gens, NES, ZSNES, N64) and I am also running DosBox. I do have a few native Linux games loaded on as well such as SuperTux and Neverball.

Then I need the streaming audio/video to work on the internet.

Finally, pretty much all the audio/video applications that come with Ubuntu Studio I would like to work, but mainly I need Ardour, RoseGarden, Audacity, Cinelerra, Open Movie Editor, Jack rack, and Kino to work.

Am I asking too much of Ubuntu for that? I certainly hope not!

Geo