Arch Linux

kutkloon

Guest

[solved] ALSA sound not working

Hi there! I installed Arch Linux yesterday. So far it has cost a lot of time, but everything works pretty smoothly. I tried my sound this morning, and it was not working (which was to be expected since I didn't do anything to make it work). So, I looked in the recommendations page on the wiki.
Based on that, I took the following steps:
  1. installed xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin and alsa-utils with pacman
  2. added my user account to the audio group
  3. Tried to set master volume. This did not work initially, I had to add -c 1:

$ amixer sset Master unmute
amixer: Unable to find simple control 'Master',0

$ amixer -c 1 sset Master unmute
Simple mixer control 'Master',0
  Capabilities: pvolume pvolume-joined pswitch pswitch-joined
  Playback channels: Mono
  Limits: Playback 0 - 64
  Mono: Playback 44 [69%] [-20.00dB] [on]

  4. Used alsa mixer, but only saw S/PDIF, S/PDIF 1, ..., S/PDIF 4. I unmuted all of them just to check if this would help.

After this, my sound did not work. I have no speakers but my headphone (which works) is connected. I have a HDMI monitor connected (which has no sound, but there is a HDMI sound channel - this has confused other OSes before, and me as well). The pulseaudio volume manager plugin is muted and shows 'not connected to the PulseAudio server' when I hover the mouse pointer over it. It also shows a little cross in the lower right corner. I can change the volume but it seems to reset to zero the moment the audio panel loses focus.

I don't know where to look on the wiki anymore. Help or pointers are very welcome. I'd be happy to supply additional information, logfiles, or the output of commands!

Last edited by kutkloon (2017-09-15 15:00:21)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,707

Re: [solved] ALSA sound not working

Post the outputs of

sudo fuser -v /dev/snd/*
aplay -lL
systemctl --user status pulseaudio

in [ code ] tags (please do this for all future outputs/text files)

kutkloon

Guest

Re: [solved] ALSA sound not working

Post the outputs of

sudo fuser -v /dev/snd/*
aplay -lL
systemctl --user status pulseaudio

in [ code ] tags (please do this for all future outputs/text files)

Ugh, this is embarrassing. The last command didn't work, because I didn't have pulseaudio. I installed pulseaudio, restarted and now everything works (but hey, that's what you get in the newbie corner ). I guess it should work without pulseaudio as well (using just ALSA), since I don't think the recommendations mention installing pulseaudio (maybe I justed missed it). I'm just happy that it works now. Thanks!

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,707

Re: [solved] ALSA sound not working

You can definitely do without pulseaudio, the point of my last command was to verify if you had pulseaudio, it was supposed to fail if that wasn't the case But in general pulse does provide some potentially useful features, so if you are happy with that situation then that's fine by me as well

Please mark your thread as [solved] by editing the title of your first post.