Arch Linux

beachcoder

Member

Registered: 2009-10-08

Posts: 130

Problems with ALSA: No suitable mixer element found.

Hi there,

since the last system update, my audacious, or more even ALSA, gets into some problems.

First, audacious won't come up at all (with the already existing configuration). It did'nt print out anything and seemed to "hang". Only killing it stopped it.

When I moved the config from .config/audacious then, audacious comes up, but shows an error message:

ERROR util.cc:140 [audgui_simple_message]: ALSA error: No suitable mixer element found.

Anyway, music is played then, but its not fine. The error comes up on every start.
I think the problem is, that I use an external 5.1 USB sound card, which is enforced by the asound.conf. The solution is not the best, e.g. it is not possible to play a youtube-video and music-track at the same time with this config, but it worked better for me than any other config I tried. I must also mention, that this config works for me since 2 years now, and I was happy that it worked so... but now it seems this breaks me the neck.

This is  my current asound.conf for the 5.1 surround-sound USB device:

pcm.!default
{
        type plug
        slave.pcm "surround51"
        slave.channels 6
        route_policy duplicate
}

pcm.dmixer
{
        type dmix
        ipc_key 1024
        ipc_key_add_uid 0
        ipc_perm 0660
}

pcm.dsp
{
        type plug
        slave.pcm "dmix"
}

Any suggestions?