Last week I plugged in an HDMI cable and to support that changed my pulse audio volume control configuration to "HDMI 2 + analog input." When I was finished, I changed the configuration back to "analog stereo duplex".

XMMS has not worked since then; I don't know why. I haven't found much help searching on line for this. I've been using XMMS for years.

As of today, XMMS won't even load a playlist. I have my session start to launch XMMS on a certain playlist and it launches empty. When I try to manually load a playlist, it doesn't work.

I'm using XFCE Fedora 28 Linux. Can anyone offer any advice?

Do you have pavucontrol installed (that's the Pulse Audio Mixer)? It should be in the repos.

It gives you more granular control than most simple volume control applications. Check the Playback-->Applications settings to make sure the XMMS stream is not muted and let us know what you find.

Yes, I do have it installed. According to the Volume Control, there is no playback stream for XMMS.

That was the case last week right after I changed the configuration to HDMI, and later changed it back.

But as of yesterday, I can't even get XMMS to load a playlist. When I open it (and I have the playlist editor displayed on load), it shows an empty playlist. I click "load playlist" and the file picker pops up. When I choose a playlist file, the file picker closes, the playlist editor blinks, and remains empty. Note this playlist file is a .pls that was created by XMMS.

I keep thinking some configuration file was removed or altered when I switch to HDMI audio but I can't figure out what.

Follow up -- don't know why I didn't try this before, but I have been trying to load playlists (which is what I always used). I just tried to load a single file, and it displays in the playlist editor. However, it doesn't play. A popup reports the error:

"Couldn't open audio
Please check that:
Your soundcard is configured properly
You have the correct output plugin selected
No other program is blocking the soundcard"

I haven't changed any of these since before I used HDMI audio and XMMS worked then.

Second follow up -- I recreated the playlist by loading the songs and saving the playlist. I can now load and play a playlist. In this sense I am back to where I was two days ago.

That is, XMMS acts as if it is playing. The little output monitor on the face bounces up and down and the play indicator scrolls across the face of the player. But there is no sound.

Pulse Audio Volume Control does not see any audio playback stream from XMMS. Rhythmbox works, VLC player works, etc. but XMMS does not.

Just to let everyone know, earlier today I un-installed XMMS and re-installed it. Just now I closed XMMS, deleted the ~/.xmms directory, and relaunched it to generate a new ~/.xmms directory. As far as I know, XMMS should be installed with everything set to the default settings.

Thanks for the updates. I probably would have tried the same steps myself.

I must admit that I haven't encountered anything like this. Do other media players work?

If so, try starting XMMS from the command line and look for helpful error messages in the terminal.

Yes, all other audio applications work (that I know of). I'm using Rhythmbox in the meanwhile until I get XMMS sorted out. But I don't like the Rhythmbox CLI. Basically, I can't figure out how to launch Rhythmbox in CLI and start a particular play list file. Tried everything in man rhythmbox and man rhythmbox-client and I don't care what they say ... it doesn't work. I *can* launch rhythmbox but it has located every sound file on the whole system and they are all in the play queue (as is the desired playlist). rhythmbox-client --clear-queue does not work, and rhythmbox --playlists-file="myplaylistfile" starts rhythmbox okay but does not clear the queue down to just the identified playlist (everything on the system plays, sooner or later).

I'd like to just get XMMS functioning again ... that is, get XMMS output stream connected to Pulse Audio.

Command line launch of XMMS looks like this:

$ xmms --play "desiredplaylistfile"
Message: device: default

** WARNING **: Failed to open font: "-adobe-helvetica-bold-r-*-*-10-*".

It is playing (GUI visible and responsive) but there is no stream shown in Pulse Audio Volume Control.

We can see from this screenshot that Rhythmbox (background) is playing, and so is XMMS. In live view, you can see the audio bars on XMMS moving up and down, as well as the playing track bug moving to the right.

But you can observe that Pulse Audio Volume Control "sees" the Rhythmbox stream (the audio level is pulsating) but it's not even showing a stream from XMMS.

Once again, this worked just fine until very recently.

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It's a long shot, but try creating a new user, then check whether XMMS plays for the new user.

I'm using a VM of Fedora here. I just installed XMMS and started to play a file, and it worked.

Have you looked in the log files? (Unfortunately, I'm not familiar enough with journalctl to offer much help in using it. I took a look at /var/log in the Fedora VM and am working on figuring it out; it is not traditional.)

frankbell, thanks for helping me think outside of the box. Create a new user ... hadn't thought of that. Well, I gave it a shot and no dice. XMMS behaves the same for the test user I created as it does for me. When starting play it reports "can't open sound output, check that the audio card is configured properly." Or words to that effect.

Seems XMMS just can't get Pulse Audio to accept an output stream from it. But I don't know why.

I'm not knowledgeable enough to read logs. If someone in the forum could tell me what logs to look for I can post the output here.

It worked on my Fedora VM, so I'm inclined to think it is not a general issue, but, at this point, this issue above my level of knowledge.

If you want an XMMS like substitute to test with, try QMMP. It looks and behaves like XMMS and will even accept XMMS skins.

[Couldn't log in to LinuxQuestions.org for two days!]

Glad to hear that XMMS works for you. I will give QMMP a look-over.

Can you send me the settings you have in: Preferences -> Audio I/O Plugins -> Output Plugin
Be sure to include what is set in Configure, as well. Thanks.

I pretty much default to QMMP these days.