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How-To: Pulseaudio

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Mrbigshot08
Posts: 243
Joined: 2006-09-07 01:30
Location: PA, USA

How-To: Pulseaudio

#1 Post by Mrbigshot08 »

This is an updated version of the How-To I used to have on these forums. I found my How-To cited on various websites around the internet and I felt awful for not updating it in so long, so I finally gathered up all the new information and edited my How-to. The old version was heavily outdated. If for any reason you regularly referenced that How-To and you need the information that was on it, I'm hosting it on my website, only because I have so much web space and I don't know what to do with it all. You can access it here:
http://www.raptorman18.110mb.com/Linux/ ... udio1.html
http://www.raptorman18.110mb.com/Linux/ ... udio2.html


Pulseaudio is a sound server which acts as drop in replacement for Esound. It allows users without a sound card capable of hardware mixing to playback multiple sounds at once. It also allows users to send sounds over a network. Learn more here:
http://pulseaudio.org/

If you're wondering why one should switch to Pulseaudio, consider reading this article by Nathan Willis on Linux.com, where he mentions this very How-To.
http://www.linux.com/feature/119926

This article talks about some of the many features Pulseaudio has.
http://arstechnica.com/journals/linux.a ... y-to-linux

On with the How-To:

Pulseaudio has always been easy to configure, as it is intended to neatly replace esd. It is even easier to configure now. Just install the packages, run the command and presto.

Before we can begin we have to install Pulseaudio in the first place. You can go into synaptic and search for Pulseaudio and install every package by that name, which will work, or you can try this:

Code: Select all

apt-get install pulseaudio libao4 paprefs libpulse-mainloop-glib0 pulseaudio-module-jack pavucontrol pulseaudio-module-hal pulseaudio-module-x11 gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio pulseaudio-utils libasound2-plugins paman pulseaudio-module-gconf libgconfmm-2.6-1c2 libpulse-browse0 pavumeter libglademm-2.4-1c2a pulseaudio-esound-compat libpulse0 libpulse-dev pulseaudio-module-bluetooth pulseaudio-module-zeroconf
Please note that entering the above command will uninstall Esound!

That command just includes the packages and modules that I just deemed most useful. All of those aren't needed, and there are other modules that add more functionality for pulseaudio such as pulseaudio-module-lirc.

After you have installed pulseaudio, copy the following into /etc/asound.conf. You must create the file! As we go along we will add some settings to this file in order to extend its functionality. On some systems the appropriate file may be /home/user/.asoundrc

Code: Select all

pcm.pulse {
    type pulse
}

ctl.pulse {
    type pulse
}

pcm.!default {
    type pulse
}

ctl.!default {
    type pulse
}
Once everything is installed and the asound.conf file is in place, start the pulseaudio server with the following command:

Code: Select all

pulseaudio -D
I'm pretty sure Pulseaudio should autostart by default, but if it doesn't, you may want to enable software sound mixing, this is done in gnome by going to system>preferences>sound then go to the sound tab and click the check box to enable software sound mixing. If you do not want system sounds, you can always disable each system sound individually, but this will start pulseaudio automatically at boot. You could also go to sessions and add the pulseaudio -D command to begin at startup, and this too will start pulseaudio automatically. There are other ways to do this as well. I use XFCE so I add pulseaudio -D to the applications that autostart.

Pasuspender

I never actually use this feature anymore because all my applications use pulseaudio beautifully. I use audacity as an example but audacity now works with pulseaudio out of the box. I'm just leaving this an example for other applications that may have trouble that I may not be aware of.

I would like to mention one of the newest and most useful developments in the Pulseaudio sound server and that is the pasuspend or pasuspender feature. This new feature enables Pulseaudio to automatically suspend it's lock of the audio device in order to allow other application to control the audio device. Whenever Pulseaudio is idle, meaning any application using sound is not running, it automatically suspends it's lock of the audio device, which will allow the user to open an application such as Audacity which does not natively use Pulseaudio, and Audacity will work through the ALSA sound system.

It is also possible for the user to force Pulseaudio to relinquish it's lock of the audio device. Just precede the command of the program you wish to start with the pasuspender command. For instance:

Code: Select all

pasuspender audacity
This will cause Pulseaudio to suspend it's control of the sound device and allow Audacity to run through ALSA as if Pulseaudio didn't exist. Pasuspender will work with any application that does not support Pulseaudio but support ALSA.

Because Pulseaudio automatically relinquishes control of the sound device and allows applications to use ALSA, this could cause a situation where you think the sound is going through Pulseaudio when it is actually going directly through ALSA. (Does that make sense?).

Well, the best idea is to check to make sure that Pulseaudio is running and that the sound is running through Pulseaudio, and there are many ways to do this.

1. If your notice that your system sounds stopped running, then the Pulseaudio daemon must not be running.

2. If you open up two application using sound simultaneously, the second one will not be able to access the sound card.

3. Open up the Pulseaudio Manager, in Applications>Sound and Video>Pulseaudio Manager, it will say if it is connected or not.

4. Run the command

Code: Select all

ps_ax | grep pulseaudio
Which should return something similar to the following if Pulseaudio is running properly.

Code: Select all

 3319 ?        Sl     1:31 /usr/bin/pulseaudio --log-target=syslog
 3322 ?        S      0:00 /usr/lib/pulseaudio/pulse/gconf-helper
26493 pts/1    R+     0:00 grep pulseaudio
5. You could always check if it is running through the system monitor, which is the same thing as the ps_ax command above.

Network Audio
Playing Sounds on other computers

Mac has airport which allows you to stream Itunes to speakers that are connected to airport. Well, rather than spend some insane amount of money for airport, we can do better with Pulseaudio. Lennart Pottering the developer of Pulseaudio, is also a developer of Avahi, the network discovery daemon. So as long as the other computer is shared on the home network, Pulseaudio should be able to play sounds on it.

The catch is, first make sure you can view the network shares of both computers from the other computer. This way you can be sure that the computers can see each other. My home network works fine, so I didn't have to worry about this, so I don't know what will happen, but make sure the computers can atleast ping each other before trying anything.

Both computers must both be running Pulseaudio. I have only tried it on Linux computers, but it should work with any computer that runs Pulseaudio including Mac and Windows, but you may run into problems unique to those systems. Also you must make sure Pulseaudio is configured to share its server.

To configure Pulseaudio to share its server, you need to go into Pulseaudio Preferences which is located in System>Preferences>Pulseaudio Preferences. Then you need to enable all the options for network discovery. Here is what mine looks like.

Then you must do the same process on the networked computer you wish to share audio on. When you are done the process the Pulseaudio Preferences tray icon should appear.

The final step is to click on the Pulseaudio Preferences tray icon, and from there you can change the default Pulseaudio Server on the computer you are sitting at, to the Pulseaudio server on your networked computer, and all sounds played on the computer you are sitting at will play through the speakers on your networked computer. It is that easy!!

You will need the paprefs package to set this up. Even if you do not have gnome, I would recommend installing the gnome-system-tools in order to do this. If you absolutely against doing that you can change the default server by editing the file /etc/pulse/client.conf

Uncomment "default server" and change it to
tcp:REMOTEIP:4713

Where REMOTEIP is the IP address of the computer you want your sounds to be sent to.

Bluetooth

I will not get into using bluetooth because it works flawlessly without any setup. Basically all I had to do was pair the bluetooth headset and it appeared as a device in pulseaudio-volume-control, and you can then select which streams you want to send to the headset. Pulseaudio-volume-control is an amazing application, it's like a compiz for sound as Lennart puts it.

ProjectM

I just wanted to take a second and mention this awesome application. It is called projectm-pulseaudio. It is in the repositories. It displays awesome visualizations for pulseaudio streams, independent of the application that the sound originates from. Exaile my favorite music player removed support for visualizations, however projectm-pulseaudio will show visualizations for the music and use fewer resources while doing it. I absolutely love this application. Absolutely no setup required and it will visualize any stream, it doesn't care, it is only visualizing what is coming out of pulseaudio. Awesome!

Applications
Getting specific applications to work with Pulseaudio.

I will only mention applications which do not appear at the Pulseaudio Wiki or that I am unhappy with the Pulseaudio Wiki's explination of. http://pulseaudio.org/wiki/PerfectSetup
The methods used in this section were performed using the "Default Setup" from above.

OpenAl
This is no longer necessary because OpenAl supports Pulseaudio now.

I used to need to edit my asound.conf and add dmix devices to get applications that used OpenAl to work, however mednafen now supports pulseaudio out of the box, so this is no longer needed for me atleast, but I will keep the information up for legacy applications.

Much of this is from the Dmix Wiki and it is my current personal setup. This enables me to get pulseaudio to work with some applications it wouldn't normally work with, specifically applications using OpenAl.

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# Part I directly from ALSA Dmix Wiki

pcm.paul { # paul is my name, you can use your name, just make sure you use it below too
    type dmix
    ipc_key 1024
    slave {
        pcm "hw:0,0"      
        period_time 0
        period_size 1024
        buffer_size 8192
       #format "S32_LE"
       #periods 128
        rate 44100
    }
}

pcm.dsp0 {
    type plug
    slave.pcm "paul"
}

# This following device can fool some applications into using pulseaudio
pcm.dsp1 {
    type plug
    slave.pcm "pulse"
}

ctl.mixer0 {
    type hw
    card 0
}

# Part II directly from Pulseaudio Wiki

pcm.pulse {
    type pulse
}

ctl.pulse {
    type pulse
}

# Optional, set defaults

pcm.!default {
    type pulse
}

ctl.!default {
    type pulse
}
This creates virtual devices in Alsa which applications which cannot use Pulseaudio directly to play sounds. The default device is still Pulseaudio however. The program I use that utilized the OpenAl system was Mednafen a Nintendo emulator. In order to get this to run, first you need the OpenAl utilities, which should already be taken care for you when you install whatever program utilizes OpenAl. (isn't automatic dependency resolution wonderful :)) Anyway, if it isn't search through synaptic or some other package management system.

Then, try to force whatever program you are using to make use of the pcm.dsp1 device I created earlier in my asound.conf. In Mednafen I simply specify -sounddevice pcm.dsp1 and mednafen will then output through pulseaudio. However, sometime the audio can stutter and be poor, so what I do is increase the sound buffer size slightly. (The default buffersize in Mednafen is 32). This may not be needed in other applications that use OpenAl but I thought I would mention that here.

This is the command I use in Mednafen to use OpenAl through Pulseaudio

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mednafen -sounddriver alsa -sounddevice pcm.dsp1 -soundbufsize 64 -vdriver 0 -nes.stretch 1 -fs 1 -nes.input.port1 gamepad "$rom"
If you are actually trying to use mednafen, you don't need to do any of this anymore. I'm just leaving the command up as an example for people who may be using legacy applications.

Avidemux

This is no longer necessary.

This one is easy, specify "Pulse" [no quotes] as the Alsa device in Edit,Preferences,Audio. Or you can tell Avidemux to use OSS and then start the application using "padsp Avidemux"
(Make sure you are using "Xvideo Accel" in Edit,Preferences,Video)

Audacity

Audacity now uses portaudio and runs with pulseaudio out of the box. Yay!

Iceweasel

Getting flash to work used to be a headache. It really isn't anymore even if you use 64bit. When Adobe temporarily removed the 64bit flash plugin I still used an old alpha version so that Pulseaudio would continue to work. I'm not too uptight about security. You'll never get pulseaudio to work with flash using nspluginwrapper.

I recommend using the newest version of flash, the beta of square is incredibly stable, it is fast, and uses less memory than previous incarnations.

To install flash player 10, is a pretty straight forward process, just go to the site, download the archive, extract it, and replace the flash plugin that is currently on your system. WARNING: You may want to back up flash player 9 before begining this upgrade.

Copy the plugin to /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so, there is plenty of information on how to do this so I will not go into more detail. Just know that there should be no problems using the right version of flash.

Tinkering
Getting Applications to work with Pulseaudio.

If your application does not work with Pulseaudio, I would try the following steps in this order. But before you try on your own, check the applications section of this How-To and the Pulseaudio wiki http://pulseaudio.org/wiki/PerfectSetup for directions for specific applications.

1.Try to specify that the program use the device "Pulse" [no quotes]
2.Try to specify that the program use the device "pcm.pulse" [always without quotes]
3.Try to specify that the program use the device "pcm.dsp1" (You must have an asound.conf that I created (or similar))
4.Try to specify that the program use the device "pcm.paul" or "paul" (or whatever name you used in your asound.conf)
5.Try to specify that the program use "dmix"
6.Try to specify that the program use the OSS sound driver. Then wrap the program with "padsp" [no quotes] (padsp is similar to aoss, except that it outputs to Pulseaudio and it seems to work much faster.)
7.Use the pasuspender command

Code: Select all

pasuspender program
Troubleshooting

1.Make sure the Pulseaudio Daemon is currently running. Check gstreamer-properties (Multimedia Systems Selector) to be sure. It may have crashed or whatever.
2.Make sure you copied the asound.conf exactly.
3.Try copying the asound.conf to /.asoundrc (this means make a file in your home directory called .asoundrc and put the same contents as you /etc/asound.conf into it.) The file will be a hidden file. For me only asound.conf works but it may be different for other people especially if you are not on debian.
4.Try a restart
5.Try the commands "sudo dpkg-reconfigure pulseaudio" and "sudo dpkg-reconfigure pulseaudio-utils" to set things back to default.
6.Try a different device as stated in the Tinkering section.
7."sudo apt-get alsa-utils gnome-audio" then type the command "aplay -D pulse /usr/share/sounds/startup3.wav" This will check if Pulseaudio is running and that your asound.conf or /.asoundrc is correct. Again, no quotes.

Notes

I have tried the oss2pulse daemon which emulates oss devices. It creates fake OSS devices that naturally output to Pulseaudio, which allows old OSS application to run easily through Pulseaudio. This is still alpha software, very much in the testing phase, but worth mentioning.

Pulseaudio and Jack

Pulseaudio and Jack are two seperate sound servers that have two completely different purposes. Pulseaudio is great for consumer audio and jack is great for commercial audio. As a musician I have actually created music using both, which for me is possible, but it is obviously not ideal for professional audio which will need jack. Lennart Pottering the developer of Pulseaudio wrote about this and gave at talk at the 2010 Linux Audio Conference.

http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/when-p ... n-not.html

Pulseaudio has the ability to connect to jack through it's module, however, this has to be done manually and it is not trivial. Pulseaudio will however get out of jack's way when it is started. I have no problems starting jack if I start it when no applications are running which is the norm when I'm doing a music project.

The only reason one would want pulseaudio to connect to jack is if you want the streams from pulseaudio. It requires jack_transport which isn't packaged, and the whole implementation in general is a bit finicky.

However, is an e-mail sent to me by CJ Van Den Berg on the pulseaudio discussing the procedure.

https://tango.0pointer.de/pipermail/pul ... 00330.html

and here is an Ubuntu How-to based upon that e-mail that goes more in depth.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=548178

Like I said, It's not something I use, but that shouldn't have kept me from posting the information sooner.

System Sounds
libcanberra has a pulseaudio library, which should make it easy to use pulseaudio to play system sounds. However, I an not currently get system sounds to work, partially because I use xfce mostly and don't use gnome often. You can however enable accessible login if you are using gdm and get sounds to play that way. You can also add a command to the autostarted applications that plays a sound on startup. For this I use the play command provided by the sox package.

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play /path/to/sound.ogg
(It can be pretty much any format when you are using the play command, that's why I use it.)

Acknowledgements/Sources

By the way, Pulseaudio is in rapid devleopment. It used to be a difficult task to get sound that originates on one computer, to play on another computer over the internet. Now that process, is really simple, and uses a great GUI. It's called Pulseaudio Device Chooser. It works really well if you have multiple computers using Pulseaudio. I just though I would mention how awesome that is, and acknowledge the great work the Pulseaudio developers are doing.

A special thanks to all the guys at the Pulseaudio Mailing List, without whom I would not even have Pulseaudio working.

Thanks to the forum member Rickh.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=75527
http://pulseaudio.revolutionlinux.com/PulseAudio
http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download ... omoid=BIOW
http://pulseaudio.org/wiki/PerfectSetup
http://pulseaudio.org/
http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php?title ... Dmix_Howto
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_ALSA_sound_mixer_aka_dmix
http://pulseaudio.vdbonline.net/libflashsupport/
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=4928900
http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html

I hope this How-To is helpful. I'm always available for questions, comments, additions, or positive feedback.

And maybe a little constructive criticism. :wink:
Last edited by Mrbigshot08 on 2010-10-07 20:03, edited 11 times in total.

User avatar
rickh
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Location: Albuquerque, NM USA

#2 Post by rickh »

I certainly didn't do anything to deserve the recognition, but I swear, I will tackle this thing within a week. Looks excellent.
Debian-Lenny/Sid 32/64
Desktop: Generic Core 2 Duo, EVGA 680i, Nvidia
Laptop: Generic Intel SIS/AC97

zasf
Posts: 5
Joined: 2007-03-04 12:32

How-To: Pulseaudio: works!!

#3 Post by zasf »

thanks for this howto, I just wanted to confirm that it even works on Ubuntu Feisty!

BTW the first apt-get command contains esound wich conflicts with pulseaudio, you could remove it from the command

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Mrbigshot08
Posts: 243
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Location: PA, USA

Re: How-To: Pulseaudio: works!!

#4 Post by Mrbigshot08 »

zasf wrote:thanks for this howto, I just wanted to confirm that it even works on Ubuntu Feisty!

BTW the first apt-get command contains esound wich conflicts with pulseaudio, you could remove it from the command
Hey, thanks for the comment. Glad it helped.

Thanks for noticing the mistake. What happend was, I used a list from synaptic of program that were installed and uninstalled and then wrote it out in the form of that command, but I forgot to take out Esound (since it was removed in the same process and therefore showed up on the list). :lol:

Thanks, again.

PS. If you use Iceweasel and flash i would be interested in finding out how well it is working for you. I have the most recent versions of both flash and iceweasel and it is currently very stable, but some people have had trouble and even I had trouble until I made certain I completely purged all previous versions of flash/gnash/swf.

I can basically watch as many youtube videos in a row as I want with out it crashing! :P

zasf
Posts: 5
Joined: 2007-03-04 12:32

#5 Post by zasf »

I don't have flash installed yet, this is a feisty test partition. I'll install it shortly but I'd like to solve a problem with esound first.

The problem with esound is that I cannot hear gnome sounds.. actually esound applications do not work. Can you help me with that?

I did everything according to the pulseaudio perfect setup

Code: Select all

$ vdir /usr/bin/esd
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 18 Mar  8 14:28 /usr/bin/esd -> /usr/bin/esdcompat

$ cat /etc/pulse/default.pa | grep esound                     
.ifexists /usr/lib/pulse-0.9/modules/module-esound-protocol-unix.so
### Load esound protocol
load-module module-esound-protocol-unix

$ gconftool -g /system/gstreamer/0.10/default/audiosink          
pulsesink
$ gconftool -g /system/gstreamer/0.10/default/audiosrc 
pulsesrc
If i run rhythmbox, the application crashes with

Code: Select all

(rhythmbox:6074): Rhythmbox-WARNING **: Couldn't find an x overlay

[1]+  Segmentation fault      rhythmbox
Thanks,
Matteo

zasf
Posts: 5
Joined: 2007-03-04 12:32

#6 Post by zasf »

sometimes apps are really slow.. it looks like they do not react instantaneously to my command. It seems that something is going wrong in background.

If I run

Code: Select all

$ gthumb &
[1] 4259
matteo@burnt:~$ /home/matteo/.themes/Gilouche/gtk-2.0/gtkrc:42: Clearlooks configuration option "menuitemstyle" is not supported and will be ignored.
/home/matteo/.themes/Gilouche/gtk-2.0/gtkrc:43: Clearlooks configuration option "listviewitemstyle" is not supported and will be ignored.
/home/matteo/.themes/Gilouche/gtk-2.0/gtkrc:44: Clearlooks configuration option "progressbarstyle" is not supported and will be ignored.
Usage:program_name [address][:port]Usage:program_name [address][:port]Usage:program_name [address][:port]Usage:program_name [address][:port]Usage:program_name [address][:port]Usage:program_name [address][:port]Usage:program_name [address][:port]Usage:program_name [address][:port]Usage:program_name [address][:port]Usage:program_name [address][:port]Usage:program_name [address][:port]
[1]+  Done                    gthumb
apart the clearlooks warning, wich app is saying this ???

Code: Select all

Usage:program_name [address][:port]
Thanks,
Matteo

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Mrbigshot08
Posts: 243
Joined: 2006-09-07 01:30
Location: PA, USA

#7 Post by Mrbigshot08 »

zasf wrote:I don't have flash installed yet, this is a feisty test partition. I'll install it shortly but I'd like to solve a problem with esound first.

The problem with esound is that I cannot hear gnome sounds.. actually esound applications do not work. Can you help me with that?

I did everything according to the pulseaudio perfect setup

Code: Select all

$ vdir /usr/bin/esd
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 18 Mar  8 14:28 /usr/bin/esd -> /usr/bin/esdcompat

$ cat /etc/pulse/default.pa | grep esound                     
.ifexists /usr/lib/pulse-0.9/modules/module-esound-protocol-unix.so
### Load esound protocol
load-module module-esound-protocol-unix

$ gconftool -g /system/gstreamer/0.10/default/audiosink          
pulsesink
$ gconftool -g /system/gstreamer/0.10/default/audiosrc 
pulsesrc
If i run rhythmbox, the application crashes with

Code: Select all

(rhythmbox:6074): Rhythmbox-WARNING **: Couldn't find an x overlay

[1]+  Segmentation fault      rhythmbox
Thanks,
Matteo

Alright, for the gnome sounds. The output of those commands appear to be right. I checked them against mine and they are indeed identical.

I have the gnome sounds working and I didn't change anything to get them to work. They work pretty much out of the box for me. However, if I remember correctly, I did have problems with gnome sounds when I used to use Ubuntu, but that was without Pulseaudio obviously.

Anyway, with Pulseaudio and Debian I didn't do much to get the sounds running. All I did is I went into System Sounds Settings Window and I made sure that both boxes were checked. "Enable Software Sound Mixing" and "Play System Sounds" both must be enababled. But for some reason the system sounds did not take effect until I rebooted. ( I do not know why but that is just the way it is)

As for the other two problems you listed, your guess is as good as mine. But I don't think they look like Pulseaudio problems. The Rythmbox problem says something about an X screen so thats out of my realm, and I do not use Rythymbox anyway. Did it suddenly just stop working? If it did maybe you want to try dpkg-reconfigure or a complete uninstall and reinstall. Thats what I would try.

And your other problem is almost complete gibberish to me. :D

zasf
Posts: 5
Joined: 2007-03-04 12:32

#8 Post by zasf »

Mrbigshot08 wrote:Anyway, with Pulseaudio and Debian I didn't do much to get the sounds running. All I did is I went into System Sounds Settings Window and I made sure that both boxes were checked. "Enable Software Sound Mixing" and "Play System Sounds" both must be enababled. But for some reason the system sounds did not take effect until I rebooted. ( I do not know why but that is just the way it is)
I did the same but they do not work :(
Mrbigshot08 wrote:As for the other two problems you listed, your guess is as good as mine. But I don't think they look like Pulseaudio problems. The Rythmbox problem says something about an X screen so thats out of my realm, and I do not use Rythymbox anyway. Did it suddenly just stop working? If it did maybe you want to try dpkg-reconfigure or a complete uninstall and reinstall. Thats what I would try.
I'm even more confident that these are esd problems, if I run esd manually I get the same output

Code: Select all

Usage:program_name [address][:port]
over and over, I tried to install plain esound, it works and the comp is much reactive.. I believe there is something with pulseaudio-esound-replacement that just doesn't work.. I still don't know what!

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Mrbigshot08
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#9 Post by Mrbigshot08 »

I did some research on rhythymbox and found the following link. It appears to be an identical problem to yours.

https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+ticket/3735

I do have some suggestions to get the system sounds to play. As I remember there are some dependencies to get the sounds to play. As far as I know the sound files that are necessary do not even exist until you install them. If you could find some type of Ubuntu how-to for system sounds I would follow it exactly and it should still work even if you are using pulseaudio.

If you can't find one these are the packages that I think you may need.

gstreamer-esd ( or something like that, its the esd gstreamer plugin if you do not already have it installed)

linux-sound-base (i believe that is what it is called)

gnome-audio ( this is the package that contains the sound files i believe)

then restart and see if you got system sounds, of course make sure the pulseaudio server is started as it should on startup

once again if you can find some ubuntu documentation on system sounds i suggest you follow it, it should still work with pulseaudio.

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Thank You!!

#10 Post by praka123 »

sorry for bumping!but the thread is very useful for me and other debian users too hopefully.
Well,im running debian sid :D
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Mrbigshot08
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#11 Post by Mrbigshot08 »

Hey, Thanks!! :D

I really should update it, I have a lot more new tips and Pulseaudio has a lot more new interesting features.
:D

I plan to play around with my setups when Thanksgiving break starts, hopefully I can update then.

One interesting new feature is call pasuspend (or something like that) it allows you to temporarily deactivate pulseaudio so that it can drop back to standard alsa, so that you can run applications such as audacity.

P.S. If there are still problems running iceweasel with pulseaudio you might want to consider Opera, it is very stable! and Feature Rich! :D
http://pulseaudio.org/
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Pulse audio works!though..

#12 Post by praka123 »

I have my Debian Sid working fine with pulseaudio and i have compiled and installed libflashsupport.so to /usr/lib/ as per pulse audio wiki.
sound works pretty well.
Only problem is when in a flash site like youtube playing a flash video,if i right click>settings, Iceweasel exits with some failed assertion error in terminal trace.i hope this is an alsa error.
BTW,I use flash9beta.
edit:the error i got as is below:

Code: Select all

$ iceweasel 
firefox-bin: pcm_params.c:2351: sndrv_pcm_hw_params: Assertion `err >= 0' failed.
Aborted
^some help?
Also,the processor gets heated up(temp from 37 to 59degrees!) when pulseaudio is used with flashplayer9 beta.
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hellfire[bg]
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#13 Post by hellfire[bg] »

Do you experience any slowness when using pulse audio. I followed this howto and when i used pulse audio my system was quite slow. The problem came from mplayer rhythmbox and all applications that use audio. For example when i use alsa and esd mplayer takes about 5% cp usage. When i use pulse audio it takes about 50-60%. I tought that the reason for this was that i did something wrong but it was the same in Fedora.
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Mrbigshot08
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Re: Pulse audio works!though..

#14 Post by Mrbigshot08 »

praka123 wrote:I have my Debian Sid working fine with pulseaudio and i have compiled and installed libflashsupport.so to /usr/lib/ as per pulse audio wiki.
sound works pretty well.
Only problem is when in a flash site like youtube playing a flash video,if i right click>settings, Iceweasel exits with some failed assertion error in terminal trace.i hope this is an alsa error.
BTW,I use flash9beta.
edit:the error i got as is below:

Code: Select all

$ iceweasel 
firefox-bin: pcm_params.c:2351: sndrv_pcm_hw_params: Assertion `err >= 0' failed.
Aborted
^some help?
Also,the processor gets heated up(temp from 37 to 59degrees!) when pulseaudio is used with flashplayer9 beta.
Yeah, Flash is a definite problem area right now. The problem Adobe doesn't support anything besides OSS, and obviously the code is closed source so there is nothing anyone can do but to file bug reports to Adobe and pray that they will fix their linux sound support for the next version of the flash player.

I'm assuming that your have everything working but it crashes upon starting a youtube video?

This can be annoying and it is something that seems to be getting worse instead of better. At one point in time, I had pulseaudio and flash working with an acceptable crash rate, say 1 crash for every 10 videos, and no crashes when not using flash. But at some point iceweasel got to the point where I can hardly even play a youtube video without it crashing. And it is tough for me to isolate the problem because I am using a strange OpenGl graphics setup which probably adds to the instability.

In the short term I would recommend trying Opera, it is very stable, there are still problems with flash videos, but if the flash player crashes, only the video crashes on that page, and all you have to do is reload the page and the video will work fine, instead of crashing the entire browser when a flash video crashes like in iceweasel.

You could also try to just let iceweasel use alsa and aoss. Since pulseaudio (since version 0.97 which is in Sid) has pasuspender, it should be very easy. ( I was going to add this to the How-To but I'll write it here too.) Pulseaudio also has a new feature where, when Pulseaudio is idle, it unlocks its hold on the sound card allowing you to access the sound card with other methods.

For instance, it is no longer necessary to kill pulseaudio to start audacity. Just close all other applications, and audacity should start using Alsa. Or you could use the command

Code: Select all

pasuspender audacity
which would also work, I think, i can't verify that at the moment.

So, if you really need flash videos, you can either switch to Opera or Epiphany, or use them just for flash videos or you can edit your /etc/iceweasel/iceweaselrc and go back to aoss (make sure you have it installed and see if you can get Alsa to work with stability on your flash videos.
http://pulseaudio.org/
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Mrbigshot08
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#15 Post by Mrbigshot08 »

hellfire[bg] wrote:Do you experience any slowness when using pulse audio. I followed this howto and when i used pulse audio my system was quite slow. The problem came from mplayer rhythmbox and all applications that use audio. For example when i use alsa and esd mplayer takes about 5% cp usage. When i use pulse audio it takes about 50-60%. I tought that the reason for this was that i did something wrong but it was the same in Fedora.
Are you using some type of real time scheduling and are you using Pulseaudio directly, i.e. no Dmix (I'm gonna delete that part of the How-To, I think).

Pulseaudio is suppossed to be low latency, and I have never noticed a problem. I do know that mplayer and rhythmbox have produced problems in the past as their support has been a little scratchy.
http://pulseaudio.org/
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zasf
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#16 Post by zasf »

As a follow-up to my previous posts, I'm pleased to tell you that I've been using pulseaudio for 6 months on Ubuntu and it works very well.

Here are some relevant Ubuntu bugs (fixed packages should be shipped with next Ubuntu release):

* pulseaudio esd wrapper is not working with gnome
* module-esound-protocol-unix and ownership of /tmp/.esd directory
* non-free Flash 9 doesn't work with pulseaudio

Matteo

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#17 Post by soldierboy »

Just wanted to drop a note to say that this worked very well for me. It even resolved the sound issue I was having with flash. Anyways, Thanks!

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hellfire[bg]
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#18 Post by hellfire[bg] »

Are you using some type of real time scheduling and are you using Pulseaudio directly, i.e. no Dmix (I'm gonna delete that part of the How-To, I think).
As a matter of fact, i noticed the slowness in mplayer. I also couldn`t get sound in cedega and wine.
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#19 Post by sayad »

soldierboy wrote:Just wanted to drop a note to say that this worked very well for me. It even resolved the sound issue I was having with flash. Anyways, Thanks!
Same here...that worked fine for me too...thanks!!:)



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mattd7591
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#20 Post by mattd7591 »

Anyone know anything or a tutorial that will work about using the network audio with it.
I am trying to forward pulseaudio sound from my linux box to my windows box via ssh tunneling, but so far absoulety nothing has worked.
Matt

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