How-To: Pulseaudio

[m_l]

Thanks for this How to. Helped me get more functionality from pulseaudio.

[El1iP3S01D]

I'm running Debian Sid xfce amd64 and i've just finished installing pulseaudio. My question is this, what does this line mean, E: main.c: pa_pid_file_create() failed.

Folks, Pulseaudio does work!!! It works with Adobe's 64 bit Flash plyaer 10.d22.87 and Mplayer... I'm using Debian xfce amd64 Sid, i'm using Pulseaudio system wide and it works...as a matter of fact i love that u could use your own EQ settings as an EQ... My only complain is that Audacity does not work with Pulseaudio; I'm guessing is a configuration problem on my part, yet i report that Pulseaudio does work and i wish that Lennart could add Underwater and Powerful feature to the EQ....

[Hadret]

Working fine on GNOME 2.26 Debian Testing/Unstable. Just wondering - anybody else have same issue, that when system starts, system sound is muted and there's need to launch PulseAudio sound settings to change that? Is there a way to save those settings?

[rplantz]

Working fine on GNOME 2.26 Debian Testing/Unstable. Just wondering - anybody else have same issue, that when system starts, system sound is muted and there's need to launch PulseAudio sound settings to change that? Is there a way to save those settings?

Same here. I get the login sound okay, but then I have to turn on the system sound after gnome has started.

Can anybody point me to a good description of how the sound system is set up? When I first installed sid I had no sound. I went through all sorts of things with alsa. The driver was loaded okay. I could play sounds with aplay from root, but not from user. None of my applications had sound. Then I installed pulseaudio and everything worked. I would like to understand the relationship(s) between pusleaudio and alsa, and why I needed to install pulseaudio. And, yes, I'm looking for the gory technical details.

Edit: I forgot to mention that the discussion at http://linux.com/news/hardware/drivers/ ... t-doing-it seems to be out of date, but it's the sort of thing I'm looking for. Probably with even more detail.

[hellfire[bg]]

Last dist-upgrade of my Debian Unstable installed pulse audio. I had several problems with it - first there was no sound in skype, second there was now sound mixing (meaning that most of the time there was only application that could have sound - for example if i play an mp3 in rhythmbox there was no sound in the flash videos i`m playing in iceweasel or no sound the games i play in wine - normally these would all mix), third seeking in mplayer was terrible - very slow and choppy, and last - suddenly another volume indicator icon appeared in my icon tray (i use GNOME) - besides the volume control applet which already was there. After i spent several hours trying to resolve the skype problem (i tried the pulse audio perfect setup) i just gave up and removed pulse audio. Are these problems common?

[Hadret]

Just two links about new feature in PulseAudio:

• http://ubuntumanual.org/posts/235/earca ... media-buff
• http://www.stefanoforenza.com/earcandy-04-rules/

Does mute issue in GNOME still persist?

[argon99]

I had some problems setting up Pulse Audio here is what I did to get it to work.

I tried this with debian, ubuntu and fedora, latest editions for them all. I followed this how2 but I didn't get any sound from my claro card. Debian has a problem with hal. This compounded the situation so I dumped it. I went to ubuntu but I couldn't get sound to work with the claro card. But it did work with a sound blaster. I then installed fedora 11 on a differnet computer and put the claro card in it. It didn't work. I used alsa-info to get the information about what alsa was doing on the fedora box. I noticed that the drivers were all 1.0.18 while the rest of alsa was 1.0.21. I downloaded the alsa drivers for 1.0.21 from herehttp://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Main_Page and compiled and installed the 1.0.21 drivers on the fedora box. Everything worked!! Had sound with flash and vlc worked with the pluse plugin and I could play mp3 and wav files no problem. I then went and tried this with the ubuntu box. I compiled and installed the 1.0.21 drivers but no joy. I ran alsa-info and found out that ubuntu was using older utils and lib as well as older drivers. I tried to update them as well but again no joy. Ubuntu isn't configured to let me do that. Many of the alsa programs would not compile because of missing dependancies. And I couldn't install them because they were not listed in synaptic. Curses is one of them. At this point I have a working system, fedora 11, that uses pulse and my new claro card so I wasn't interested in debugging ubuntu I am now in the process of loading fedora 11 on the box I wanted the claro card for. I hope this bit of information will help out those that want to get pulse working. I'm sure that if you can jump through all the hoops to get all of alsa updated to 1.0.21 you will be happy. But there are many hoops, good luck.

[El1iP3S01D]

Folks, do you need Alsamixer to make Pulseaudio work, because i have no sound?

[El1iP3S01D]

Mr. bigshot, i followed your how to the letter and i can't for the life of my hear the audio or any sound on my Debian Lenny xfce4 64 bit? any input that you could offer? My mobo is a Asus P5N-D and it is a HD audio chip set by nvidia and chip sound by Realtek...

[praka123]

Firstly, I am on a 64-bit Debian Squeeze with 32-bit Flash Plugin.
--
I Moved off to 32-bit Adobe Flash Plugin with nspluginwrapper After Following @Craigevil's Thread here:
Howto get Adobe Flash working in 64bit
And Flash Works Fine On Iceweasel,Chrome etc.
--
BUT ,Pulseaudio was not enabled earlier.Add a new entry with below content to your startup using Gnome startupmanager(or whatever startup scripts You have) :

Code: Select all

start-pulseaudio-x11 -D

^Of course ,with pulse,pulse-access groups as local user's secondary groups.
Pulseaudio Works Fine with most Applications and Multiple Instances are also working Fine.
--
But Iceweasel ,Chrome Browsers are not having Sound with Flash Video(Youtube for eg) AS, I have 32-bit flashplugin installed using nspluginwrapper.

Then ,I saw this Bug Report:
Debian BTS:Please add libgdbm3 and libwrap0

ldd /usr/lib32/alsa-lib/libasound_module_pcm_pulse.so also showed 32-bit libgdbm3 and libwrap0 missing.
I have to extract(dpkg-deb -x xy.deb /path/to/directory) libgdbm3_1.8.3-9_i386.deb,ibwrap0_7.6.q-19_i386.deb to the respective lib32 directories and it worked!
Now I have sound with Flash Video in Browsers.
PS:There is No Need to edit /etc/iceweasel/iceweaselrc to add padsp etc as in the First Post.

Hope it Helps.

[Hadret]

Anybody using PulseAudio + OSS4 with success? (:

[Parsifal]

Anybody using PulseAudio + OSS4 with success? (:

I've just got PulseAudio working on my machine with OSS4, although I still can't work out how to get JACK to see it (and JACK2 doesn't seem to like to work with OSS4 directly, either; I got it to work temporarily by building JACK1 myself from source). I followed this easy guide to make PulseAudio see OSS4:

http://www.opensound.com/wiki/index.php/Configuring_Applications_for_OSSv4#Pulseaudio

This page was quite helpful too, in testing the setup (Warning: /dev/urandom is a source of random noise, so make sure your volume is turned way down before you try the first command here!):

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Configuring_Sound_on_Linux/Pulse_Audio/Testing

There's also this page, which I found very helpful in getting ALSA to see PulseAudio (since I couldn't get ALSA emulation to work on OSS4, I'm doing it through PulseAudio instead) and with general troubleshooting:

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio

[jlinkels]

My apologies if I hi-jack this thread.

I just installed Debian Squeeze, and let Pulse installed instead of removing it like I did on most of my other computers. The 100.000 dollar trick is to install PulseAudioVolume control as well to get it working. I wonder why this is not installed by default when Pulse cripples the audio system. Without PulseAudioVolume there is no way to uncripple it!

Anyway, I have huge problems with Skype 2.2.0.35. I can get Skype to work with Pulse. Not difficult at all. In Control Panel I have assigned my USB headset to the "Communications" application.

In Skype, both system sounds and regular audio are assigned to PulseAudio.

In PulseAudioVolume I have configured the profiles for the various audio hardware present, and I see them correctly in the Output Devices and Input Devices tabs. When I make a test call with Skype, in the Playback and Recording tabs I see Skype being active, and I see the VU meters (progress bars indicating the sound level) moving.

The problem is however that after a random time mostly between 10 and 60 minutes, Skype does stop working with Pulse. I haven't touched anyhting related with sound or Skype, but suddenly Skype doesn't seem to connect to Pulse anymore. Sometimes I can resolve this by starting a test call again, sometimes by restarting Skype, sometimes by restarting KDE.

When I restart KDE, I don't do anything else and Skype is functional again until the next time it stops. Of course, when someone calls me, Skype doesn't work which is both annoying and embarassing.

Anyone seen this before?

jlinkels

[sej7278]

i've noticed with skype that i have to make a test sound or test call before i make a call, otherwise i get silence with vu meters bouncing around.

i also noticed at gdm startup where the sound should be, there's a big pause and then the user selector renders.

methinks there's still plenty of bugs in pulseaudio on wheezy, but its certainly better than alsa.

[vbrummond]

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.

Edit: In answer to your first question: No, pulseaudio has very low cpu usage for me.

Hi Vanessa13! I was just going to supply some more information about pulse I learned here when you posted. Good timing! Try this (just to see if it works). From the debian documentation on pulse:

PLEASE NOTE: PulseAudio's default configuration uses high quality sample
rate conversion that may be overly CPU intensive. If PulseAudio's CPU usage
is unacceptable on your hardware, please change the resample-method option
in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf to either src-linear or trivial. See daemon.conf
for more details.

To to this open a root terminal and run this command:

Code: Select all

nano /etc/pulse/daemon.conf

Change the line that says "; resample-method = speex-float-3" to "resample-method = src-linear". It should look something like this:

Code: Select all

; log-backtrace = 0

resample-method = src-linear
; enable-remixing = yes
; enable-lfe-remixing = no



Press CTRL+X to save if you used nano and then Reboot. Does this help?