On Wed, June 16, 2010 09:43, Steve Holdoway wrote: > ... cant linux get it's sound sorted out properly? > > I've lost mine again... I know it works as I get a 'click' when a new > window opens. But playing anything at all - forget it. > > System says everything's fine. > Gnome sound preferences widget can see both the analog stereo and the > usb headset, and is allegedly outputting, at volume 100% to both. > alsamixer has all sane values next to it. > > Just no output on either device. Can anyone point me to a decent, up to > date ( this is ubuntu 9.10 ) troubleshooting guide. > > Or start a project to provide a sane alternative to alsa... (: > > Cheers, > > Steve >
I share your frustration with Linux sound. We started with OSS, which was okay *if* you had a card that was supported. Then ALSA came along and it was struggle for a bit in the beginning. To date it still has issues playing from more then one source at a time. So several sound daemons were made, esd, arts, etc. that tried to solve that problem. But then they don't play with apps that need real-time access to the hardware. And finally with the last few versions of Ubuntu there is a push for pulseaudio which I think is utter rubbish. It seems to me the real problem lies in ALSA's inability to work with more then one source. There are some workarounds that disable ALSA from locking the card to one app. I think that 10.04 is better in the PA area... but only just. For my mythtv frontend boxes I remove PA and just use ALSA. For a desktop, you might consider esound (esd) or look at upgrading PA with a PPA to a newer version. BTW, one thing I remember about 9.10 and PA is that sometimes launching the apps from a terminal worked. Yet I wouldn't get sound running from the gnome menus. Might be an environment issue with gnome-session not having access to the PA variables? Cheers, sV
