Arch Linux

Zaek

Member

Registered: 2012-06-06

Posts: 7

[SOLVED]Sound issue, works with some programs, not others.

Hello good people, allow me to give a brief introduction before I get shot down, burnt and fed to the dragons.

I've been running Arch for about a week now, (Been running other distros for about 5 years) and so far everything is fine, I love it, however, I've run into a bit of an issue, that I can't seem to fix with my lack of knowledge, so I seek your expertise and better knowledge of gnu/linux in general to help me diagnose and hopefully fix this problem. I don't mind spending 40 days fixing a problem, if I learn something from it.

Right, the problem!

TL;DR version : sound doesn't work with vlc, works with most of the other programs.

Long version:

At first, I could just play sound through Spotify using wine(Skype was the only other program that actually made sounds) and I noticed no flash videos were working. So, we couldn't have that! And I ventured into internet to try to find a fix!
After a while, I eventually stumbled over another forum post saying no sound in VLC, so I tried that, and no sound there either, and that was a more pressing matter, so I shifted focus on that problem, whilst trying to get VLC to give me sound, I installed pulseaudio (mostly for the pavucontrol) -  And well, pavucontrol told me VLC was giving out sound, no problem. but I heard nothing on the speakers however, still, I figured I could try a reboot, (Been using windows for too long, reboots fixes everything, woohoo)

Then something interesting happend, sound from flash suddenly worked, then, for diagnostics, I tired to play a song on spotify, that failed with an error saying "There is an error with your soundcard." (Maybe I just lack knowledge about how ALSA, pulseaudio and linux in general does things, but this puzzled me)
So, the program I use first to play sound, seems to become the greedy user of the soundcard.

So, I kept searching for a way to fix the sound in VLC. and I've yet to reach success.

Oh, and another slightly interesting thing is that the speaker-test does not work.

Maybe my default configured sound device is actually wrong, but some programs bypass it, and use another one. That would explain a thing or two.

This happens when I run speaker-test
http://pastebin.com/K5tSXH91

This is my current .asoundrc file
http://pastebin.com/kBqcABLR

Output of aplay -l

http://pastebin.com/PgGcSjBV

And to be honest, I'm not really sure what configuration files you'd want to see for this.
Maybe something for pulse? or alsa? VLC?

I'm very sure this is a problem I've caused myself, and that I should read a manual the size of the bible, but I'm not really sure what direction to go, what manual to read. nor what to even google anymore.

Before you tell me to RTFM, I'm under the impression that whilst yes, reading the manual 50 times does help, actually asking people with knowledge also helps.

Thank you very much for taking the time to read all of this, and if you've got any ideas, be they crazy, or rational, I'm open for them.

Edit: Sorry if all this became very messy and hard to understand, I tried my best.
Zaek.

Last edited by Zaek (2012-06-10 19:32:19)

quasifilmie

Member

Registered: 2011-10-27

Posts: 296

Re: [SOLVED]Sound issue, works with some programs, not others.

For vlc you can change your audio output module etc in preferences. For the flash problem, what you DE or WM are you using? Also see this thread.

Zaek

Member

Registered: 2012-06-06

Posts: 7

Re: [SOLVED]Sound issue, works with some programs, not others.

Hello, and thanks for the reply.

I should've probably mentioned that I tried to all the sound configurations I could find in VLCs sound settings, it doesn't seem to change anything at all.

I'm running openbox-standalone. I'll read up on the thread you sent now.

Update: I swear I tried this earlier, but when playing a video in VLC, I entered the configuration tab in pavucontrol, selected 'Analog stereo output' and suddenly, sound from VLC.

Update2: Rebooted, to check if the problem was really gone. And things are back to how they were in the first place.

Last edited by Zaek (2012-06-10 18:53:56)

Terminator

Member

From: Belgium

Registered: 2012-05-07

Posts: 265

Re: [SOLVED]Sound issue, works with some programs, not others.

If you are using pulseaudio, multiple applications should be able to play sound together. Since you mentioned you installed pulseaudio: I assume you installed it but aren't using it. Try installing pulseaudio-alsa (which configures alsa to use the pulseaudio server).

Zaek

Member

Registered: 2012-06-06

Posts: 7

Re: [SOLVED]Sound issue, works with some programs, not others.

Terminator:  I read up on pulseaudio on the wiki, told me it was a good idea to install pulseaudio-alsa, so I did.

VLC is configured to use pulseaudio, started it manually, and as far as I can tell it's running, as when it's not running VLC tells me that it can't connect to pulse

Thanks for the reply!

Update: It seems you were right Terminator, I wasnt using pulseaudio.

I had tried to play sounds before I had actually started pulseaudio.

Causing something else to take control, now, I think all I have to do is configure flash and wine to use pulseaudio, and I'll be good to go!

I'll update this as soon as I've tried to configure flash and wine!

Last edited by Zaek (2012-06-10 19:12:12)

Zaek

Member

Registered: 2012-06-06

Posts: 7

Re: [SOLVED]Sound issue, works with some programs, not others.

Everything works flawlessly now.

Thank you very much Terminator! I was not running it through pulse, as soon as I sorted that, things just fell into place.