Re: sound problems... alsa & systemd? Partially FIXED

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On 04/03/2017 06:34 PM, Kay Schenk wrote:
---see below --

On Mon, Apr 3, 2017 at 9:53 AM, ken <gebser@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 04/02/2017 01:31 PM, Kay Schenk wrote:


On 03/29/2017 06:43 AM, ken wrote:

On 03/28/2017 08:53 PM, ken wrote:

The www has failed me with this, so I'm trying you guys.  Sound worked
great out of the box when I installed 7.2... Yay!  I could watch all
kinds of videos, like on facebook and youtube.  And I could listen to
most podcasts too.  But then something happened. It was either a
kernel upgrade or that I installed vlc (for watching videos on DVD)
and the whole stack of codecs for it... I don't know exactly when, but
at some point I no longer had sound with youtube  and other web
videos.  The videos played fine, just no sound.  Note that using vlc,
both video and the audio with it play just fine.  I need to select the
audio driver (from a list in a vlc menu), however, else the sound
won't work in vlc either.

If I go into the Applications menu, then System Tools -> Settings ->
Sound, under "Choose a device for sound output:" there are no devices
listed.  There used to be.

If I run "aplayer file.wav", nothing plays (no sound at all) and I get
the error "main:786: audio open error: No such file or directory".
If, on the other hand, I run "aplay file.wav -D plughw:0" (i.e.,
specify the/a device), I do get sound, the file does play.

I ran alsa-info.sh and it posted tons of info from it on my setup at
http://www.alsa-project.org/db/?f=1dba91886be054df4816000768
a0f5b109947a48.
Yet it still doesn't tell me what's missing.

Anyone here have an idea...? or thoughts about where to look next?

tia,
ken

Still poking around my system for a solution, I found this comment at
the top of /usr/lib/systemd/system/alsa-state.service and two other
files in the same directory:

# Note that two different ALSA card state management schemes exist and
they
# can be switched using a file exist check -
/etc/alsa/state-daemon.conf .

The /etc/alsa/state-daemon.conf file consists of one line:

# Remove this file to disable the alsactl daemon mode
I understand that a daemon continually runs, waiting for an event and
then acts in some way in response, but it has to mean something more in
this context.  Anyone familiar with the internals of this?


I am not on systemd right now. I'm on CentOS 6.8. However, on an
openSUSE version I was. Sound problems were the bane of my existence
forever it seemed. So it maye take you a while to troubleshoot this. Using
JUST alsa you should be able to play sound files at the command line. See:
http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Main_Page


I think I may have installed pulse-audio to get things working under
systemd with my GUI. What is your GUI? This may be a factor.

Thanks for the thought.  This is quite plausible.  I did a little reading
at the site you suggested and then at another which was linked off of
that.  I didn't find anything helpful at either place yet... well, except
that in the audio stack alsa is just one layer; jack and pulseaudio ride on
top of it.  Apparently sound on linux can use all of them-- and others on
both of the same layers-- all at the same time.  This is probably what
makes the configuration of them all so challenging.

In the middle of reading those sites I decided to see if audacity (a quite
sophisticated and solid program) could somehow handle sound. I installed it
and fired it up.  Out of the box it didn't work.  But I simply had to
choose the correct device from audacity's drop-down menu and, viola, it
would produce sound from a loaded file.  Cool.

Right after that, I tried running "aplay /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front_Right.wav"
and that worked.  Previously it didn't, although (as noted above)  that
same command when specifying the device did (i.e., "aplay
/usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front_Right.wav -D plughw:0").  So apparently
installing and/or running audacity fixed something, but not everything.

Another trippy discovery:  I used rpm to verify all the files installed
with all the alsa* packages and there were absolutely no changes to any of
them... they're all exactly as they were when first installed.  Since sound
worked exquisitely when I first installed 7.2 on this box and no alsa files
have been changed since then, it's hard to find the fault with alsa.

Although aplay is back to working without having to specify the device, I
still don't get sound out of youtube videos (even though I checked the
settings and restarted Firefox), and gnome3's System Settings -> Sound
still lists no devices at all.  These are two major failures.

Does anyone know how to restart audio in systemd?  That might still be
worth looking into.

Before doing audacity, I tried gnome's mplayer.  Geez, is that a stinky
pile of code.  Just selecting a directory where a file could be selected
ended up locking up the app; I had to do a kill to get it off my screen.
Does that actually work for anyone?  If so, what kind of files or net
locations does it work for?

Thanks once more for your thoughtful suggestions.

​Here ya go! A lovely sysvinit to systemd cheatsheet!

​
  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SysVinit_to_Systemd_Cheatsheet

​Well assuming your sound is started at this level. It should be in your
systemd scripts. (I can't help with this as I have not used systemd in a
WHILE). ​

Thanks much.

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