Arch Linux

larsrh

Member

Registered: 2010-10-28

Posts: 12

[Solved] Fresh install of KDE+PulseAudio: only KDE able to play sound

Update: See this post for a solution. The problem might have been fglrx/Catalyst.

Hello,

as indicated in the subject, I have a fresh installation of KDE on my desktop with standard Intel on-board sound. I installed pulseaudio and pulseaudio-alsa.

According to http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/KDE, when the Phonon configuration looks like http://www.pulseaudio.org/attachment/wi … broken.png, PulseAudio should not work at all. I can confirm that. However, on my laptop, I am also running x64 Arch and everything works fine with the same setup.

To be a bit more specific about the current behaviour: I have several devices listed in the Phonon settings, e. g. "HDA Intel PCH (ALC892 Analog)", "default" and "hw:0,0". Clicking the "Test" button actually plays a sound except for "default". Furthermore, KMix looks as it should look: four tabs: "Playback Devices", "Playback Streams", ... MPlayer is not able to play a sound file, neither without further options, nor with "-o alsa", nor with "-o pulse". The same is true for vlc. Strangely enough, Amarok is able to play its own "Amarok Theme" (the OGG track which plays at first startup), but neither a FLAC nor a MP3 file. Amarok doesn't turn up in the "Playback Streams" tab of KMix.

"lsof /dev/snd*" reveals that knotify4 has a handle on "/dev/snd/pcmC0D0p". Killing that process makes vlc able to playing files of all three formats using ALSA output on "hw:0,0". Amarok however is still only able to play its OGG file and additionally claiming that Phonon wouldn't be able to play MP3 files. For mplayer, everything remains the same.

For me it looks like there are multiple issues all at once.

Regards
Lars

Last edited by larsrh (2011-12-10 20:12:39)

KingX

Member

From: CA

Registered: 2010-03-24

Posts: 324

Re: [Solved] Fresh install of KDE+PulseAudio: only KDE able to play sound

I am not quite sure what is going on with your system but do you have libmpg123 and flac installed? Those libs are needed for mp3 and flac playback. Do you have audio in your browser? say if you watch a video on youtube etc.

larsrh

Member

Registered: 2010-10-28

Posts: 12

Re: [Solved] Fresh install of KDE+PulseAudio: only KDE able to play sound

Both are installed. There is no sound for flashplugin either (lib32-alsa-plugins and lib32-libcanberra-pulse are installed).

KlavKalashj

Member

Registered: 2008-10-09

Posts: 376

Re: [Solved] Fresh install of KDE+PulseAudio: only KDE able to play sound

Both are installed. There is no sound for flashplugin either (lib32-alsa-plugins and lib32-libcanberra-pulse are installed).

There is a 64-bit version of flashflugin now, you don't need the lib32*. Which backend do you use?

larsrh

Member

Registered: 2010-10-28

Posts: 12

Re: [Solved] Fresh install of KDE+PulseAudio: only KDE able to play sound

I'm using the gstreamer backend for phonon, if that's what you're asking.

KlavKalashj

Member

Registered: 2008-10-09

Posts: 376

Re: [Solved] Fresh install of KDE+PulseAudio: only KDE able to play sound

I'm using the gstreamer backend for phonon, if that's what you're asking.

Ok. Have you tried installing more plugins, like gstreamer0.10-good-plugins gstreamer0.10-ugly-plugins gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg?

larsrh

Member

Registered: 2010-10-28

Posts: 12

Re: [Solved] Fresh install of KDE+PulseAudio: only KDE able to play sound

Installed all of them and behaviour of mplayer doesn't change.

Pajaro

Member

Registered: 2004-04-21

Posts: 884

Re: [Solved] Fresh install of KDE+PulseAudio: only KDE able to play sound

I had the same situation. I solved it like this:

First, have phonon to use pulseaudio through the vlc backend

2.A) Then, if you want flash plugin to have sound, try libflashsupport-pulse from aur. This is not the solution I use because it makes flash unstable. If it works for you, then make all your programs use pulse and setup .asoundrc to use pulse plugin by default.

2.B) If flash is unstable to you too with pulse and you intent to hear what comes from flash then you have to use this other approach.
   0 - Install jack2. It doesn't matter if you install the dbus version or not.
   1 - Install laditools form aur and run laditray.
   2 - install libflashsupport-jack.
   3 - Have all the programs you can to use jack.
   4 - For the ones you can't, use pulseaudio
   5 - Follow the instructions here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pu … ew_new_way
   6 - setup .asoundrc to use jack as default.

Support for 32 bit applications:

though jack2 has a configure option to make it 32 bit compatbile, it is not applied in archlinux, so you can install jack2-multilib from aur, which is the same than jack2 but with --mixed option added to configure.

NOTE: Recently wine programs lost the ability to output sound to something different than alsa, so neither with pulseaudio or jack i have sound anymore with wine. Any help with this would be appreciated.
NOTE: Using jack gives you full control of audio, so you can do cool things, like record sound from any program, add global equalization / volume normalization, or pass your mick through an effects rack to make pranks through voip calls.

larsrh

Member

Registered: 2010-10-28

Posts: 12

Re: [Solved] Fresh install of KDE+PulseAudio: only KDE able to play sound

Okay, this is really strange and nobody is going to believe that: After deinstallation of the fglrx/Catalyst driver (which is a pain for my quite recent graphics card -- no suspend, X server crashing on video playback), it suddenly worked. I just needed to adjust the precedence of the playback devices in the KDE phonon settings (put "Internal Audio Analog Stereo" on the top), then everything went fine. I did not change something else.