For some odd reason my KDE system sounds wont play, or just make a random buzzing sound lately. Only the .ogg ones, the wav files play fine.

These are the .ogg files found in "/usr/share/sounds".

My sound card works fine, all other file types play fine, except .ogg. I can get .ogg files to play in a few random players like smplayer or xmms.

But Noatun wont play them, which is the default sound player it seems for KDE. And when I switch the default player for the .ogg files in the "KDE component chooser section" i end up with an xmms or smplayer popping up and active everytime a sound is being requested. Not an ideal sound system.

Does anyone have any solutions for this? I tried to find a codec pack missing for Noatun or something but everything I find says it plays .ogg natively.

Thanks in advance for any help.

iirc, the ogg is an audio format. As you have smplayer installed , clearly you have mplayer installed too.

Could you just kill kde , go to init 3 (type 'init 3' as root) and then try to play the same file with mplayer from the command line (make sure you have run alsamixer and increased volumes !) .

If it plays there , there is something wrong with KDE , if not then there is something wrong with your codecs.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Although mentioned above I can play the .ogg files in other players such as Mplayer/SMplayer/xmms no problem. So your suggestion for trying it from the command line I have already tried and works fine.

The problem then lies in if I use any of those programs as the default player for my sounds every time a system sound is called<ie. opening a window sound> the player loads up on the screen then plays the sound then just remains on the screen.

All of which is a bit cumbersome for just having a system sound play.

hmm, I believe you go to control panel, system notifications and then player settings. I hope that will help.

Thanks again for the suggestions, I tried all the different players possible in that section and thats how i got the external programs to load for the sounds, which was inconvenient.

But FINALLY I have got my problem solved so I figured I would post up the solution in case someone else encounters the same problem.

After searching google for most of hte day I came across a similar thread from another board<sorry forgot to copy the link for reference>.

I am not sure why it works, but it does for my problem, I am assuming that is is some kind of lock file for the sounds?

And then restart X and everything was back to normal.

Give it a shot if you have a similar problem.

Thanks. Exact same thing happened to me and removing the knotifyrc file / restarting X fixed it.