Hi,

Sorry in advance for the length of this but:

I'm suddenly having a problem with (I assume) certain multimedia apps in XFCE recognising my default HDMI sound device.

When I say suddenly, I mean it - Amarok had been giving me some trouble with not shutting down cleanly, leaving processes which I assumed to be zombies but nevertheless seemed to hang the sound card up, and yesterday it stopped playing music at all, so I got rid of it (not a huge fan anyway). Following that, Juk stopped playing, halfway through a song, earlier today, and then began behaving exactly as Amarok had been - freezing up, causing me to have to force quit and leaving behind unkillable processes with my sound card unusable until a reboot. Xmms simply wouldn't produce any sound. In each of these programs I made sure I had the correct sound device selected in the settings AND tested all the other options just to be sure. I installed Audacious, which I remembered liking a lot in the past and the exact same thing happened, it functioned briefly and then became unusable, the only difference being that with Audacious I occasionally hear a split second of music playing (suggesting that I definitely do have the correct sound device selected) before it stops.

On a fresh reboot, aplay works fine from the command line, as does Mplayer, both with and without the -ao option (so obviously that correctly recognises and respects my default audio device), as does sound in Chrome, sound in Steam, sound in Dragon Player. However, as soon as I try to use one of the problematic programs then the previously-working ones will also stop functioning until I reboot. Mplayer then gives me repeated "audio got stuck" errors, aplay looks like it's playing but produces no sound, videos on Dragon player mostly won't even open after that, otherwise they briefly play without sound and then freeze. "alsactl restore" won't work, fuser -v /dev/snd/* shows nothing else is using the sound card but it's still unavailable to anything else. I haven't tried unloading and reloading the audio modules yet, or just restarting X without rebooting but I could, if that would be informative.

My sound devices are

and I have the HDMI device 1,3 set as default in my alsa.conf as well as in /etc/asound.conf and ~/.asoundrc, which are both like this:

I can actually get the ALC887-VD Digital device on 0,1 to work with Audacious but the sound is horribly distorted using that, and has been since I installed 14.1 a couple of weeks ago, which is why I've been using the HDMI device. It took a little setting up but for the last two weeks, the HDMI sound has been working fine.

In alsamixer / xfce4-mixer / kmix etc. I have absolutely no controls for my Intel MID device, i.e., amixer just shows:


the only option I have is basically to turn it on or off by checking or unchecking the IEC958 box in kmix, for example, which is annoying but has been that way since a fresh install and until yesterday hadn't caused any problems that I couldn't solve by pressing the volume buttons on my speakers!

I've been investigating this problem all day and found a lot of people with similar issues but as far as I could tell they turned out to be pulseaudio problems whereas I'm only using alsa.

Thanks for any help with this, I've used Slackware for years specifically because it's *not* mysterious and so it's extremely frustrating that this problem just popped up without me changing or updating anything.

I know this doesn't solve your problem, but please change your asoundrc from:

To:

The asoundrc that in your post has no software mixing, and can play only one sound at a time. The one I recommend changing it to has software mixing.

Thanks a lot, I will do when I get home. Should that solve the second part of my problem, i.e. having no mixer controls on the HDMI device, by itself, or do I then need to use ALSA softvol & dmix to get those?

P.s. I already have those settings in my /usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf but not in my asoundrc

So I changed my asoundrc and I now have volume control on my HDMI which is a great improvement, but unfortunately no change to the original problem. Thanks for your help so far.