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twelveeighty

Member

Registered: 2011-09-04

Posts: 1,456

[SOLVED] Plasma 5 Notifications / Phonon Test doesn't work

I have KDE Plasma 5 with Phonon GStreamer backend, and I'm using PulseAudio. I can't get the KDE notifications to output anything. Under System Settings - Multimedia - Audio and Video, Audio Playback, I have an entry called "Default" under the "Default Audio Playback Device Preference". There's a "Test" button, but it doesn't output any sound. I also tried several notifications under System Settings - Notifications, that have a "Play a sound" setting, clicking the little "play" button also doesn't output any sound.

If I monitor PulseAudio with pavucontrol while I'm doing these tests, nothing pops into the Playback tab, and it simply shows "Silence".

Playing other sounds, such as music via the browser works fine and pavucontrol displays the playback device as the browser as well.

Anyone have any tips on where to look for troubleshooting? I checked ~/.xsession-errors and journalctl -b, but nothing is logged there.

Last edited by twelveeighty (2016-02-04 17:39:11)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,435

Re: [SOLVED] Plasma 5 Notifications / Phonon Test doesn't work

If you only have a default output in phonon, your pulseaudio isn't starting properly or something blocks your card. Can you post

sudo fuser -v /dev/snd/*
pacmd list-cards
pacman -Qs pulse

You might also want to restart pulse with some verbosity:

systemctl --user stop pulseaudio.socket pulseaudio.service
pulseaudio -vvv

Are you using some sandbox program like e.g. firejail? They have known issues with handing over shared memory, try to disable them if you do.

Last edited by V1del (2016-02-04 07:35:16)

twelveeighty

Member

Registered: 2011-09-04

Posts: 1,456

Re: [SOLVED] Plasma 5 Notifications / Phonon Test doesn't work

V1del - thanks!. You got me to the right place. Your comment on only having the "Default" output in Multimedia got me checking what packages I had installed and I realized that I did not have qt5-gstreamer and gst-plugins-good installed.

It's interesting that phonon-qt5-gstreamer does not require qt5-gstreamer. Once I installed qt5-gstreamer and gst-plugins-good, I got all the Pulse Playback devices listed under System Settings - Multimedia - Audio and Video - Audio Playback and my notification sounds are working!

tl;dr: make sure to have qt5-gstreamer and gst-plugins-good installed.