Pulseaudio Comanded To, "Silence"

[Basil Chupin]

On 22/05/11 14:12, Richard S. Crawford wrote:
>
>
> On Sat, May 21, 2011 at 7:01 PM, Bill vance <faptagon at gmail.com 
> <mailto:faptagon at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     Howdy folks;
>
>     Since I re-did my Lucid system a couple weeks ago, I've been
>     having a real
>     nightmare getting Pulseaudio working again.  Nothing I've gotten
>     from the
>     archives has worked, including pavucontrol, which fixed it last time.
>     Pavucontrol
>     did inadvertantly give me a clue though.  In the input and output
>     device windows,
>     the volume slider bars are lacking a slider, and on the left, just
>     below each empty
>     slider bar, is the word, "silence".  I have been unable to find
>     this documented,
>     anywhere, in, "man pavucontrol", nor have I found it documented
>     anywhere else.
>
>     Help!!!
>
>
> To get the best performance out of your sound system, try this:
>
> sudo apt-get remove pulseaudio
>
> Works for me every time. ;-)
>
> (Seriously, I don't have an answer for you. PA gives me nothing but 
> grief, and I always remove it the instant it shows up in my system.)

Certainly pulseaudio together with alsa gives lots of grief.

Before pulseaudio there were no hassles with sound - apart from the 
occasional glitch for whatever reason, but certainly not the grief which 
is now being experienced by users.

Almost every second question in user support mail lists now has 
something to do with audio.

And, of course, the pulseaudio developers blame something in alsa - 
which is only natural when you cannot get your coding correct and don't 
give a damn about finding a solution to your coding errors.

However, consider yourself fortunate because in openSUSE, which is what 
I now use (KDE version), the link between alsa and pulseaudio is 
immutable: you cannot remove pulseaudio without getting a dependency 
error for alsa. *BUT*, you can 'disable' pulseaudio - but cannot remove 
it! - in YaST2's settings for the sound (card).

It took me quite a bit of effort to try and work something out for my 
system, which has an Audigy4 sound card, to get sound. And it was only 
10 minutes ago that I got the sound on my wife's system to work which 
has an earlier version of an Audigy card! (and I installed openSUSE 11.4 
KDE on her system several days ago).

My advice is, irrespective of which distro you are using, is to-

1) install alsamixer (alsmixergui may not work, but alsamixer will - 
except maybe in Ubuntu where you need to uninstall pulseadio (dunno for 
sure now because things may have changed by now <shrugs shoulders>));

2) start an application which will produce sound - eg, I start, say, 
xine to view a TV program (but, of course, this has no sound - yet);

3) run Terminal/Konsole (whatever it is called in your distro) on 
another desktop/workspace) and start alsamixer with 'alsamixer <Return>';

4) when alsamixer appears on the screen, press F6 and select the card 
which has been recognised during installation (the default shown here is 
"default" which means sweet FA);

5) press F-something (see the menu on screen) which will show you *ALL* 
the available parameters to fiddle with;

6) depending on your audio system (simple stereo audio, surround 5- or 
7-speaker system, for example) adjust the sound levels for the channles;

7) but IN PARTICULAR play around with the few AUDIGY x parematers and 
also the S/PDIF parameter - but do this while your audio application is 
running so that you can hear the sound when you correctly alter one (or 
more) of these parameters.
On my system I had to turn off S/PDIF to get sound while on my wife's 
system a short while ago I had to turn off AUDIGY M to get her sound 
back and running! Go figure. But before this pulseaudio crap it was only 
a matter of setting the sound level after selecting the Master Channel.

HTH

BC

-- 
"The time has been
That, when the brains were out, the man would die,"
                  "Macbeth", Shakespeare