Arch Linux

LinG

Member

Registered: 2017-07-23

Posts: 35

[SOLVED] Audio output not working (PulseAudio)

Pretty much as the title says... I can't get any audio to play from my system, both the inbuilt speakers in my laptop but also connecting a headphone doesn't produce any sound

Here is a list of things that I noticed while trying to get it working:

- In pavucontrol under "input devices", There are 2 bars, 1 for the volume and another bar that goes up and down as I talk to the microphone of my laptop, which seems to suggest that the microphone works. However, under "Output devices" there is only 1 bar under the port category "speakers", which controls the volume but there is no 2nd bar that would indicate any sound, it also doesn't appear if I try to play a mp3 file using VLC.

- if I go to configuration and I switch to any other profile and then back to the origin profile, which is "Analog stereo duplex" and I go back to "output devices" the port changes from Speakers to "Dummy output". This dummy output does, however, have 2 bars, and the second bar also goes up and down when I try to play a mp3 via VLC but no sound is coming out of my speakers...

- using

speaker-test -c 2

does produce sound

- installing alsa-firmware didn't help either (so I removed it again)

I have the following (audio related) packages installed:

 pulseaudio pulseaudio-bluetooth pavucontrol plasma-pa alsa-utils

Additional: running KDE plasma with sddm (if that is of any influence...)

Last edited by LinG (2017-08-06 16:50:43)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,435

Re: [SOLVED] Audio output not working (PulseAudio)

Play something then post:

sudo fuser -v /dev/snd/*
pacmd list-cards
pacmd list-sinks
pacmd list-sink-inputs

LinG

Member

Registered: 2017-07-23

Posts: 35

Re: [SOLVED] Audio output not working (PulseAudio)

Found the problem, by default it only installed gst-plugins-base, but you need gst-plugins-good as well in order for pulseaudio to work (strange that it is not a dependency, but required to be able to use it...). Oh and you also need gst-libav for kid3 to play music.

(The GStreamer wiki also mentions it, but I didn't stumble across it in the PulseAudio wiki page)

Maybe this is of use to someone else

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,435

Re: [SOLVED] Audio output not working (PulseAudio)

None of those have any direct relation to pulseaudio, they are needed for Phonon's gstreamer (and by extension most KDE programs) integration with pulseaudio, but they have no dependency on pulseaudio itself. And since you mentioned VLC (for which it also doesn't matter) I did think you had some other setup problem. But well nice to hear you managed to solve it.

LinG

Member

Registered: 2017-07-23

Posts: 35

Re: [SOLVED] Audio output not working (PulseAudio)

None of those have any direct relation to pulseaudio, they are needed for Phonon's gstreamer (and by extension most KDE programs) integration with pulseaudio, but they have no dependency on pulseaudio itself. And since you mentioned VLC (for which it also doesn't matter) I did think you had some other setup problem. But well nice to hear you managed to solve it.

Does this relate to the choice I made when I installed plasma-desktop, I remember I could choose between the phonon-vlc and phonon-gstreamer backends? I think I choose gstreamer...

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,435

Re: [SOLVED] Audio output not working (PulseAudio)

Yeah, gstreamer simply needs a few additional plugins depending on what formats you want to play, which you've found out now. Technically the gst-libav contains the kitchen sink because then ffmpeg will be used. gstreamer does have it's own decoders in the -good -bad and -ugly packages.