[SOLVED] alsa and pulseaudio problem

scarrz · 08-30-2014, 02:27 PM

hi all,

I have a problem here that I have not encountered before in a Slackware install WITHOUT Dropline GNOME installed (and I have it installed now) and it installed pulseaudio so I am going to assume that this is the culprit.

my problem:
no audio in games. (specifically darkplaces quake, yamagi-quake2 and ioquake3. I own these games so I kinda figure that I want them installed and functioning properly on my system so any help here would be appreciated. everything was working with alsa and gstreamer before I installed dropline and it's pulseaudio package. I have since un-installed the dropline pulseaudio package and replaced it with the updated version from slackbuilds hoping that recompiling pulseaudio would solve the problem but it did not. also, I cannot run alsamixer in the terminal so something is up and it's probably an easy fix. here's the output of that command:

Code:

~$ alsamixer
ALSA lib dlmisc.c:252:(snd1_dlobj_cache_get) Cannot open shared library /usr/lib64/alsa-lib/libasound_module_ctl_pulse.so
cannot open mixer: No such device or address

I'm not an idiot, but I need a little help. thanks.

ppr:kut · 08-30-2014, 04:28 PM

The shared library you are apparently missing is part of alsa-plugins

You (or something) have alsa configured to use pulseaudio for audio output. Since it can't load the plugin, it can't do anything with the sound it gets and hence your games (and other apps using alsa directly) are silent.

scarrz · 08-30-2014, 06:44 PM

thanks bro...

I fired up pkgtool and checked the versions of some packages dropline GNOME overwrote. so far I have removed some packages and:

Code:

sboinstall ffmpeg

with the PULSEAUDIO=yes option

Code:

sboinstall alsa-plugins

and now I have sound in my games and a master out for alsamixer. THANK-YOU

not only do I have sound in my games but I have sound in chromium when I am browsing http://youtube.com ... a problem I had posted on LQ previously but nobody was able to solve. so kudos to you, my friend... you aced this one.

bartgymnast · 08-30-2014, 09:09 PM

scarrz, so you installed ffmpeg and alsa-plugins from sbo.org ?
what else did you change ?

This will help in updating dropline gnome to address this issue.

ppr:kut · 08-31-2014, 04:19 AM

FWIW, ffmpeg should have no impact here. ffmpeg's pulseaudio support entails that it can transcode audio from pulseaudio input to another format, so potentially for use cases like screen recording, or recording skype conversations. But for being able to hear audio in games, it would hardly be relevant.

So the only reason for ffmpeg here would be alsa-plugin's optional dependency on it, but I'm not sure what that would do. I doubt it would be relevant either.

scarrz · 09-01-2014, 12:07 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by bartgymnast

scarrz, so you installed ffmpeg and alsa-plugins from sbo.org ?
what else did you change ?

This will help in updating dropline gnome to address this issue.

after installing those packages everything was fine. I JUST installed slackware-current and am going thru the motions of getting this set up again. alsa-plugins didn't build with the dropline version of ffmpeg and that's why I installed it. As far as my other changes... I had to find a slackbuild for audacious-plugins and install libcue to get my favorite audio player working with .cue support... (not dropline related) and I removed totem and replaced it with the sbo version because the interface is a little easier to use and it adds gst-plugins-bad and ugly to the build for dvd support and whatnot; and since vlc is no longer available on sbo totem is my replacement. I do not want to use AlienBob's vlc package as I prefer to use software form sbo first and foremost before anything and totem seems to run a bit better anyways.

So far my dropline GNOME pet is proving to be quite a challenge but I am not giving up! It works... it's just really slow and font rendering is buggy with the nVIDIA proprietary driver.

scarrz · 09-04-2014, 03:25 PM

hello again...

recently migrated to slackware64-current and am getting dropline GNOME set up again and am doing ALOT of tweaking. seems pulseaudio will not run as a normal user but runs fine as root. (ie: I can hear sound in games and YouTube and pulseaudio plugins in my favorite multimedia apps like audacious and totem) I have uninstalled the pulseaudio package from the gnome install as well as alsa-plugins and ffmpeg and all the gst1 plugins and replaced them with the SBo versions.this is what happens when I:

Code:

bash-4.3$ pulseaudio

Quote:

E: [pulseaudio] pid.c: Daemon already running.
E: [pulseaudio] main.c: pa_pid_file_create() failed.

so I:

Code:

bash-4.3$ killall pulseaudio

and:

Code:

bash-4.3$ pulseaudio restart

and I get:

Quote:

E: [pulseaudio] main.c: Too many arguments.

and I am scratching my head because this exact same setup worked in Slackware64 14.1 as a normal user.

I seem to remember jack audio needing special permissions to start it's own server... and at install pulseaudio was suppose to do that but I am wondering if it didn't. doing homework, any help would be much appreciated.

Drakeo · 09-04-2014, 09:57 PM

etc/pulse/default.pa

Code:

load-module module-alsa-sink device=dmix
load-module module-alsa-source device=dsnoop

the output your reading is just that. If pavucontrol stops working. Then you need to restart the xorg or reboot.
this can be handled with outher edits to your default.pa. But we want alsa to control pulse in slackware.
And if using KDE we want the default devices chosen in kmix multimedida settings. To be used.

Quote:

killall pulseaudio

really does not do that ok. pulseaudio -k
but if your /etc/pulse/client.conf is

Quote:

; autospawn = yes

It will just restart.

scarrz · 09-07-2014, 01:30 AM

heads up...
I must have had left my old settings in my home dir. removing ~/.config/pulse and logging out/in solved my problem. thanks again for your help.