No sound after running Flash, YouTube, etc. (pulseaudio solution)

[Vegetarianrage]

If anyone with any experience can something in this post feel free to pm me.

As I understand it, Pulseaudio is a "soundserver" which is simply to say that it takes the input from your apps and manages/mixes them to send it all as a single stream to the soundcard.

After running flash audio in firefox, (youtube, for example) my sound would no longer work for anything but other flash audio. Trying to play audio files in totem or any other player would hang at 0 seconds.
A very help user in #alsa on chat.freenode.net walked me through this solution last night and the end result was that my sound worked with flash and other programs, even simultaneously.

Here is EVERYTHING that we did:

<hypercool^> my sound seems to work fine, then i load a webpage with flash in it, which also works fine. But afterwards, only flash sounds will work. normal sounds will not play
<wishie> hypercool^: flash has a way of not using 'dmix' on some systems.. which means it hogs the soundcard.
<wishie> hypercool^: is pulseaudio working ?
<wishie> pulseaudio is a 'soundserver'
<wishie> basically, apps send sound to it, and it mixes the sounds together, and outputs to the sound card.
<hypercool^> i checked synaptic and it is installed for sure.
<hypercool^> i had sound before i tried to use flash
<hypercool^> so i assume it works? or it did?
<wishie> well, make sure its running..

ps aux |grep pulse

<hypercool^>

john@eleanor:/etc/init.d$ ps aux |grep pulse
john      5866  0.0  0.2  28628  6004 ?        Sl   Apr27   0:00 /usr/bin/pulseaudio --log-target=syslog
john      5872  0.0  0.1   5776  2248 ?        S    Apr27   0:00 /usr/lib/pulseaudio/pulse/gconf-helper
john      7721  0.0  0.0   3008   772 pts/0    R+   00:22   0:00 grep pulse

<wishie> hypercool^: so, its running.. now we want to know if its being used..heh
<wishie> hypercool^: is libflashsupport installed

sudo apt-cache policy libflashsupport

<hypercool^> ok
<hypercool^> "installed: none"
<hypercool^> i'm a little confused, what does libflashsupport do if i already have working flash?
<wishie> tells flash to use pulseaudio, among other things
<wishie> was there a 'candidate' ?
<hypercool^> yes 1.9-0ubuntu1
<wishie> install that

sudo apt-get install libflashsupport

<hypercool^> wishie, ok installed it
<wishie> unfortunately, im not too familiar with the ubuntu 8.04 default install..
<wishie> hypercool^: check if padevchooser and paman are installed

apt-cache policy padevchooser
apt-cache policy paman

<hypercool^> no, neither of them are installed
<hypercool^> but there is a candidate for each one? should i repeat what we did for libflashsupport?
<wishie> ok, install padevchooser and paman

sudo apt-get install padevchooser paman

<hypercool^> ok
<wishie> that way, we can monitor if flash uses pulseaudio
<hypercool^> thanks for explaining i hate following blind instructions
<hypercool^> installing...
<hypercool^> done
<wishie> hypercool^: ok, run (i think, from memory) its padevchooser

padevchooser

<wishie> is there an icon in the gnome bar now ?
<hypercool^> wishie, lol yes good call
<wishie> hypercool^: what options does it give (been a while since i used it.. brb
<hypercool^> manager, volume control, volume meter (playback), volume meter (recording), configure local sound server
<wishie> manager
<wishie> thats the one you want to run

Note: You can run the manager by clicking the pulse audio icon in the gnome bar and clicking "manager" or by running

paman

in a terminal.

<hypercool^> lol
<hypercool^> ok
<wishie> run that, click on the clients tab
<wishie> run a flash video, and see if it shows up as a client.
<hypercool^> yes just showed up
<hypercool^> oh well this interesting, it shows up but the flash video won't play lol
<hypercool^> ok it's working
<hypercool^> it's in the client list
<hypercool^> wishie, "Adobe Flash" showed up in the client list
<wishie> configure your other apps to use pulseaudio now..
<wishie> create the file ~/.asoundrc

sudo nano ~/.asoundrc

<wishie> and put the following in it.

pcm.!default {
type pulse
}
ctl.!default {
type pulse
}

<hypercool^> ok done
<wishie> test flash with other programs now
<hypercool^> testing...
<wishie> each program you open, should show up in "clients" tab of paman
<wishie> they should all play nicely now
<hypercool^> hopefully
<wishie> are other sound apps showing up in 'clients' as you use them ?
<hypercool^> yes.....
<hypercool^> you're a genius thank you
<wishie> heh
<wishie> now
<hypercool^> everything seems to working
<wishie> you might want..
<wishie> pavucontrol, pavumeter
<wishie> each program now has its own seperate volume control aswell
<wishie> and you can monitor it all, etc.
<hypercool^> niceeeeee
<wishie> all accessible from 'padevchooser' (which is the tray icon)
<wishie> why ubuntu doesnt have it like this in the first place, is beyond me.
<hypercool^> yeah i don't know
<hypercool^> even vista has process specific volume control
<wishie> well, you can even move streams to different cards with PA
<wishie> if you have several cards, you can move different sound streams to different cards, mid stream... on the fly
<hypercool^> niice
<hypercool^> well that's coming
<hypercool^> but i'n not there just yet
<wishie> well, i gotta run now
<wishie> bread to bake
* wishie is now known as wishie[work]
<hypercool^> THANK YOU!
<wishie[work]> no worries
<wishie[work]> you're welcome

[fizikz]

Thanks! I was having the same issue and getting libflashsupport, padevchooser, and pamon seem to have solved the problem. The only difference is that I had to restart X after having installed these to start seeing the 'Adobe Flash' entry in the clients tab (as described in the above post), and I didn't make the .asoundrc file.

[thorgal]

the .asoundrc is for apps that still use the ALSA layer because they have not been programmed with direct PA instructions. So PA provided an alsa plugin to fool these apps. Same with a jack plugin to be able to run with jack. When PA is properly configured, it is very flexible. You can net-stream to your LAN through PA as well. Just run the PA daemon in all your running boxes and each one of them can become a sink and a source for the others.

[fizikz]

A while after having 'fixed' the problem as I described above, at some point Youtube stopped working. I read in some places that Pulse may have some problems with Flash, and although I don't know what they are, I'm guessing I ran into this. When I tried to open Pulse Audio Manager, it said 'could not connect to sound server' and showed no other information. I have since added the .asoundrc file as described in the first post and restarted X. So far it's working...

The problem that often comes up goes something like "Pulse: Connection to sound server failed. Connection refused." I sometimes see this output in the terminal when playing an audio file with mplayer. At times it will also include a similar error about ALSA. The last time this happened it seemed to be using OSS to play after having failed to use Pulse or ALSA. However, usually it is only the Pulse error message that shows up, if any. These problems get me a bit homesick for my good old Dapper.

One thing that comes to mind is that in Dapper I had downloaded the tarball for Flash from Adobe's site and installed it in the usual way compared to now with Hardy where I've only installed flashplugin-nonfree via Synaptic Package manager. It sounds like it's the same thing, but I never know just what the package manager actually does.

[thorgal]

One thing that comes to mind is that in Dapper I had downloaded the tarball for Flash from Adobe's site and installed it in the usual way compared to now with Hardy where I've only installed flashplugin-nonfree via Synaptic Package manager. It sounds like it's the same thing, but I never know just what the package manager actually does.

it is the same thing. The ubuntu package is simply a wrapper that downloads the flash plugin for you so you do not have to manually download it yourself from the website. The plugin itself cannot be part of the ubuntu package.

[fizikz]

After having added .asoundrc, I've noticed that some programs previously had no sound problems (aMSN, several games) now don't have sound anymore. If I remove .asoundrc, they work again. Is there a way to reconcile this?

[Vegetarianrage]

After having added .asoundrc, I've noticed that some programs previously had no sound problems (aMSN, several games) now don't have sound anymore. If I remove .asoundrc, they work again. Is there a way to reconcile this?

You may have to go into the sound settings of these applications and change the device that they are using. If they were previously trying to access the device directly and now pulse has it all the time, they will not be able to play sound. Tell the programs to route their sound output to the pulsemixer. I had to to do this for one or two things but all of my programs work now with sound simultaneously, including flash and skype. Hope this helps.

[culturepunk]

Thanks alot for this, I was having the same problem! Sorted it now.

[ivodalves]

Hello,

I've also sound problems in my Laptop.

More strange is. I can hear sound in my headphone output but not in my speakers.

Can someone help?

Thanks

[banzairx7]

Thank You! Im a complete ubuntu nube and was having this problem for weeks. This so far has 100% solved it.

Only hang up I ran into, because I have no idea what Im doing, was creating asoundrc file. After I entered the text in the editor I had to figure out how to save it. I figured out I had to hit ctrl+X and then answer "Y"

again thank you!