JUst to clarify a bit. pulseaudio sits on top of alsa-- ie it needs alsa (or
oss) to be running properly in order for it to work. It takes audio streams
from the programs and mixes them together and sends them off to the alsa
drivers, etc (at least when it is working properly). This means that if, for
some reason, alsa is not working properly, pulseaudion cannot work. But is
pulseaudio is not working, then also can still play the music as long as the
program is set up to send the music to alsa.
William G. Unruh | Canadian Institute for| Tel: +1(604)822-3273
Physics&Astronomy | Advanced Research | Fax: +1(604)822-5324
UBC, Vancouver,BC | Program in Cosmology | un...@physics.ubc.ca
Canada V6T 1Z1 | and Gravity | www.theory.physics.ubc.ca/
On Fri, 14 Nov 2014, Alan McConnell wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 13, 2014 at 07:17:54PM -0600, Alves, Prashant wrote:
>>
>> Hi Alan,
>>
>> Sorry for the late reply. I have lost access to the pc that was similar
>> to your setup so I will not be able to do any experiments. My replies
>> are below.
> No need to! The solution to my problem was absurdly
> simple. I have suspected for quite a while that I
> needed pulseaudio to work "on top of" ("underneath"?
> "alongside of"?) alsa. I have in /etc/init.d/
> an executable named also-utils, also one named
> pulseaudio. From my "research"(aka searching helplessly
> around on the Internet) I discovered that ALSA needs
> pulseaudio to function. So I ran the command
> pulseaudio --start
> and got an error message. "well, that didn't work!"
I am sure that was not the error message. Had you told us what it was we might
have been able to explain to you want it was trying to say.
> I thought, and went back to experimenting. Several
> hours later, I tried a video I have, using vlc,
> and Lo and Behold! the sound was there, perfect. ? ? ?
> I ran ps aux | grep pulse and pulseaudio was
> running. The error message was a fake warning of
> some sort ? ? ?
>
> So now I'm happy. I've closed my bug report to
> Debian -- the first report I've filed in 10 years
> of using Debian -- and I can get off this
> alsa-users E-list. I haven't yet figured out: am I
> stupid, or what? <g> You gentlemen can tell me what
> you think<g>.
Sound is still one of the areas of Linux which is pretty messed up, in part
because of the vast vast diversity of sound hardware-- there are hundreds of
companies out there making sound cards, and each thinks they have to compete
by making their sound card's control more obscure than their competitor.
pulseaudion was supposed to unify the situation. It is fine sometimes but if
there is any problem lower down it is terrible and hides rather than reveals
those problems.
>
>>>> Did you check alsamixer to ensure that the outputs are not muted ? Also if
>>>> you have pulseaudio installed, you would have to check pulse audio mixer
>>>> to ensure the sound is not muted there (or remove pulseaudio to debug or
>>>> reduce complexity).
>>
> Alsomixer, also amixer, work fine now. I know I can turn the
Alsamixer?
> sound on or off, adjust the level, etc, if I need to. But
> I plan to follow the old maxim: "if it ain't broke, don't
> fix it."
>
> There is one slight issue remaining: the executable
> /etc/init.d/pulseaudio is not working on my system, for I
> had to run the command pulseaudio --start this morning
> when I turned my machine on. Do you know how to make it
> work? It is of course no problem to run pulseaudio --start
> by hand, and I can probably put this command into my
> .bashrc, but still . . .
You need to have an entry in /etc/rc?.d where the ? refers to the runlevel you
run at, which starts with S, has two digits (listed at the beginning of the
init.d/pulseaudio file) and then the name pulseaudio. It is a link to
/etc/init.d/pulseaudio. Eg,
ln -s /etc/init.d/pulseaudio /etc/rc3.d/S75pulseaudio
(I do not know that those are the right numbers for Debian-- I do not use
Debian)
>
>> [prashant] Unless you really need pulseaudio why don't you remove
>> pulseaudio for debug purposes (
> Just for curiosity's sake: what other Linux program
> could I substitute for pulseaudio? Someday, when I've
> picked myself up off the floor, I might feel like playing
> with it. I am a musician, play violin and viola, so
> the temptation is there.
Jack? Or just the "bare" alsa.
>
>> You would have to figure out the card and device. I do not remember the
>> commands I used to figure those out and unfortunately as I mentioned
>> earlier cannot experiment on the hardware.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Prashant
> Cheers indeed, Prashant! I am very grateful to you for
> taking the time and expending the thought and effort on my
> (silly?) problem that you obviously have done. Also
> thanks to Clemens.
>
> I'll stay on this E-list in hopes of getting responses about what
> other people use instead of pulseaudio.
>
> Alan
>
> --
> Alan McConnell : http://globaltap.com/~alan/
> No one minds what Jeffreys says . . it is not more than a week ago
> that I heard him speak disrespectfully of the Equator.(Sydney Smith)
>
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