Xfce and system sound issue

bendipa · 05-02-2021, 10:05 AM

There appears to be an issue when I run Linux Mint on Xfce. Audio is present and works ok if I run an application like VLC or SMPlayer, but there is an issue with sound events. Eg, if I bring up the Sound Settings GUI and click on 'Test Sound' nothing is heard. But if I run command speaker-test -c2 -t wav then I get sound that the GUI should have given me ('Front Left, Front Right'....). Similarly if if I bring up the Sound Settings GUI, and hit the tab 'Sounds', none of the events listed work. I know that libcanberra has to be installed for sound events to work, and running command dpkg -l | grep canberra produces output as below, so nothing looks to be missing there.

Code:

ii  gnome-session-canberra                      0.30-5ubuntu1                                    amd64        GNOME session log in and log out sound events
ii  libcanberra-gtk3-0:amd64                    0.30-5ubuntu1                                    amd64        GTK+ 3.0 helper for playing widget event sounds with libcanberra
ii  libcanberra-gtk3-module:amd64               0.30-5ubuntu1                                    amd64        translates GTK3 widgets signals to event sounds
ii  libcanberra-pulse:amd64                     0.30-5ubuntu1                                    amd64        PulseAudio backend for libcanberra
ii  libcanberra0:amd64                          0.30-5ubuntu1                                    amd64        simple abstract interface for playing event sounds

The same output shows when I run Mint on Cinnamon where the sound events all work just fine. I've checked that nothing has been muted. So what is the problem with Xfce?

business_kid · 05-02-2021, 01:28 PM

I've just been having sound issues which were sorted with fixes to /etc/pulse/default.pa

AFAIK, xfce don't interfere with sound, and this is a pulse/alsa problem.

bendipa · 05-02-2021, 02:35 PM

default.pa has no connection to sound events or their configuration, but is concerned with pulseaudio sinks and whether they get correctly allocated to alsa. This is not a pulseaudio issue.

business_kid · 05-03-2021, 05:05 AM

I stand over the 1st line of my post. I'll accept that you don't think it's a pulse issue. I don't think it's an xfce issue. You don't encourage responses by dismissive replies.