Pulse audio problems

[Member PPC]

I never paid much attention to people that complained about sound problems in Linux- since I began using Linux, some 20 years ago, I never had none- until recently- I’ve been using antiX only on my machines for 4 years or so. currently I have 3 computers.
On my more powerful machine, I installed “Heroic”, a FOSS version of Epic Store – against my original expectation, all those Windows only games I got for free there work perfectly, out of the box except no sound.
I use apulse with firefox, and it usually works. It does not with heroic, probably because heroic uses it’s own installed version of wine… that runs without the apulse prefix…
I checked out D.O.’s video on how to enable pulseaudio and…
I installed pulseaudio, knowing full well that many people reported problems with it for years…
I don’t report my computer’s info for now because this happens on 3 machines, with different hardware:
-on my netbook – pulseaudio looks like magic- if it’s on, no sound at all, kill it and sound playing, just like magic
-on my work desktop- pulseaudio detects only a “dummy output”
-on my home computer- against what I was expecting, it ran perfectly in my first try- I started it (pulseaudio -D &), started Heroic, loaded a game- and there- sound and video, as flawless has if it was running the game on a Windows machine! But, after I rebooted, no audio at all, several reboots in:
sometimes no sound with pulseaudio, only with alsa, sometimes audio didn’t come back when I killed pulseaudio. Once I had audio via pulseaudio but I had no way to change volume!
…Several “how to”‘s in, and nothing, it always failed to work- it does not indicate “dummy output”, I can see the volume bar going up and down on pauvcontrol, just no audio… So I tried again a tip from the forum:
pulseaudio -k (to kill pulseaudio)
pulseaudio -d & sleep 3 && volumeicon &
Then I started Epic, and nothing, I tested a video file, still nothing… So I ran this:
pauvcontrol

I noticed it indicated the audio for the epic game- so I changed the device to the correct one (CMI8738 pci…) and sound started coming out…
but I do have to change the audio output device for every single new app I start, or else, it produces no sound…

Any tips on that? All my systems have antiX 19.X 64bits, and are installed in real hardware (not virtualized), and usually I have volumeicon off…

P.

• This topic was modified 1 year, 2 months ago by PPC.
• This topic was modified 1 year, 2 months ago by PPC.

[Member calciumsodium]

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PPC wrote:

All my systems have antiX 19.X 64bits

Hi @PPC,

Once I upgraded most of my computers to antiX 21, I am not having pulseaudio problems. I only have a few 32-bit computers. On those, I have antiX19. I have also experienced some pulseaudio problems especially with antiX19.4. I have not tried antiX 19.5. I have done something that maybe unique to me. I have chosen to go back to using antiX19.1, but making sure the expire key is up-to-date and the kernel is up to date and the browsers are up to date. I don’t update anything else on that system. Using antiX 19.1, I don’t have pulseaudio problems.

So, what I am saying, in my experience, using antiX 21, I have not had any pulseaudio problems.

[Member blur13]

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I guess you probably read my previous post about this, and pulseaudio is an acknowledged problem in antiX 19.5. Although this sounds like a different issue. I don’t do much gaming, but I keep a windows partition for that explicit purpose.

[Member Pap]

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PPC wrote:

-on my netbook – pulseaudio looks like magic- if it’s on, no sound at all, kill it and sound playing, just like magic
-on my home computer- against what I was expecting, it ran perfectly in my first try- I started it (pulseaudio -D &), started Heroic, loaded a game- and there- sound and video, as flawless has if it was running the game on a Windows machine! But, after I rebooted, no audio at all

I believe the problem is not caused by your game or Wine. The reason I think those are not related is because I had very similar problems on my netbook and on my home computer. And I didn’t try to install Wine or anything gaming-related – I just tried to set up bluetooth audio. At first, everything worked, even bluetooth. After rebooting, no sound, not even by speakers, unless I get rid of pulseaudio. Just be happy pavucontrol actually sees your sound device, because in my case, not even that.

Anyway, from past experience I know pulseaudio doesn’t really support alsa well, because I also had similar problems with volume and sound card. This is what worked for me (in Slackware, but the problem is so similar I guess it will work for you as well): Run alsamixer first, and make sure the sound card is set correctly, then set volume(s) to your liking. After that, make sure
alsactl restore
runs every time you boot the machine. Hopefully this should solve the problem and you will be able to change volume by pavucontrol as well, although volumeicon is what I do (and the changes are remembered next time you reboot).

Official, dedicated, determined, fanatic systemd HATER since... its release.

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