8.10 Sound in some apps, not in others

[ve4cib]

I've just upgraded to 8.10, and updated everything that had updates available for it. But I'm encountering... anomalous issues with sound: I have sound working just fine in some applications, and no sound in others.

I have gone to System>Preferences>Multimedia Systems Selector and tried all the options there. The only one with any sound is OSS. (Prior to the upgrade I used ALSA for everything, and everything worked just fine.) I then went to System>Preferences>Sound and set that to OSS as well, hit test on everything, and heard the expected test tone.

But when I go to actually do anything with sound I get issues. VLC has no sound at all, but Totem works fine. Amarok worked fine before updating everything (i.e. immediately after I upgraded from 8.04), but now it's silent. I have no sound in any games, and YouTube videos are silent.

When I log in I get the usual system sounds, and they seem to be working just fine.

So far I have tried the instructions posted here:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=964165
http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php...&postcount=472
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...eneric-671852/

Executing

$ sudo cat /dev/urandom > /dev/dsp

does emit static, as it should.


Some extra information about my system:

OS: Ubuntu 8.10 x86_64, upgraded from 8.04 via alt. CD
All upgrades installed
uname -r: 2.6.27-7-generic

PC: HP Pavillion vd6308ca
Processor: AMD64 Turion x2
RAM: 1GB

lspci:

...
00:10.1 Audio device: nVidia Corporation MCP51 High Definition Audio (rev a2)
	Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Device 30b7
	Flags: bus master, 66MHz, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 11
	Memory at b0000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
	Capabilities: <access denied>
	Kernel driver in use: HDA Intel
	Kernel modules: snd-hda-intel
...

cat /proc/asound/cards

 0 [NVidia         ]: HDA-Intel - HDA NVidia
                      HDA NVidia at 0xb0000000 irq 11
 1 [pcsp           ]: PC-Speaker - pcsp
                      Internal PC-Speaker at port 0x61

I'm using Gnome, but with a few KDE apps installed (i.e. Amarok instead of Rhythmbox).

I know the boards are being bombarded with sound-related issues right now, but any help from anyone more experienced in the ways of multimedia would be great.

If you need any additional information, or if you're experiencing the same problems as me please post! Thanks a lot for the help in advance!

[ve4cib]

On a hunch I just tried uninstalling the totem-gstreamer package and replacing it with totem-xine. After doing this I tried playing some music and a movie with Totem. Using the xine backend there was no sound.

Upon removing totem-xine and putting totem-gstreamer back Totem went back to working normally.

So this means that the issue I'm facing is something affecting xine, but not gstreamer. I don't know what that means, but maybe it's useful to someone who knows more about this stuff than I do?

[kivanov1992]

I have almost the same thing, but in addition the usual login sound is also not played back. Changing everything to OSS does nothing -- I hear test sound, but no sound in Amarok or Flash. Besides, everything goes OK in Totem & Rythmbox.
Please say us what to post for more info?

[amaethon1]

I'm having exactly the same problems. I had no sound problems in 8.4.

lspci:

 0 [SB             ]: HDA-Intel - HDA ATI SB
                      HDA ATI SB at 0xfe024000 irq 16
 1 [Headset        ]: USB-Audio - Logitech USB Headset
                      Logitech Logitech USB Headset at usb-0000:00:12.0-2, full speed

[ve4cib]

I'm not entirely sure why, but my sound has semi-spontaneously fixed itself.

After I got up this morning I did some more poking around and came across this very old bug report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/debian/+s...ver/+bug/51734

It's not exactly relevant anymore, but I did get some ideas from it. So I executed:

sudo apt-get install module-init-tools
sudo apt-get autoremove
sudo apt-get install --reinstall linux-sound-base
sudo apt-get install --reinstall alsa-base
sudo dpkg-reconfigure alsa-base

The first command was in response to that bug report just in case the same (or similar) dependency issue was rearing its ugly head. The second was just to clean up some extra packages I had kicking around.

After reinstalling and reconfiguring I opened up System>Preferences>Multimedia Systems Selector and System>Preferences>Sound and set everything to "Autodetect" (a setting that did not work last night). For some reason it works now. I have sound in Amarok, YouTube/Flash, VLC, and Totem.

I'm not willing to call this "resolved" yet, since I don't know what I did or if the fixes will stick, but something has apparently improved since last night.

[ve4cib]

Apparently it's not resolved. I still have no sound in some games (notably Urban Terror and Nexuiz), but I do have sound in Supertux2.


EDIT:
Upon yet more tinkering I discovered that Urban Terror and Nexuiz were having problems with SDL. I replaced libsdl1.2debian-pulseaudio with libsdl1.2debian-all and reinstalled libsdl-mixer1.2 and libsdl-image1.2, and sound now works in both those games.

sudo apt-get install libsdl1.2debian-all
sudo apt-get install --reinstall libsdl-mixer1.2
sudo apt-get install --reinstall libsdl-image1.2

This, combined with my earlier reinstallations/reconfigurations seems to have made sound work in my most frequently-used applications.

I will continue testing and will continue to post in this thread with the results.

[ve4cib]

Nope. After a reboot the sound is back to its frustratingly inconsistent, original self. No sound in Amarok/Flash/VLC/Games, but Totem works just fine >

Does anyone have any idea what's going on?

[kivanov1992]

May be it's a bug in ALSA? I'm not a guru, but what about trying to roll it back to previous version? If I find how to do it, I probably do it tomorrow.

[One Quick Question]

Hello. I was having a similar problem, although I couldn't get the sound to work at all anywhere. (But cat /dev/urandom > /dev/dsp worked anyway)
Found this thread, then later found a solution, so I'll share it with you.

Turns out that I wasn't a member of the audio group. Execute the command "groups" to see if you are. If you're in the same boat I'm in, simply edit /etc/group (as root) and add your username to the audio group.

This doesn't take effect immediately, so you'll have to log out and log back in. If it works, then hurray!

[ve4cib]

I already tried that. I am part of the audio group:

username@hostname:~$ groups
username adm dialout cdrom floppy audio dip video plugdev fuse lpadmin admin sambashare