Hello,

I would like to ask about Pulseaudio. I am on Sabayon Linux 5.0. It seems the the sound system is completely screwed up and I would like to know, if the problems I have will somehow improve?
Here is my post on SL Forum:
http://forum.sabayonlinux.org/viewtopic ... 57&t=18430

As you see the main problem is that I have to close Amarok (I tried other music players) in order to watch a video in the web browser.

Why for example Amarok is using Pulseaudio and at the same time the Amarok equalizer is blocked because "not suppoerted by Phonon" ?
What is Phenon?

Why is it that my sound in general works, but when I login to the system my notifier says Pulseaudio is not working (although I can see the process)?

Code: Select all

rysiek@RichlionSL64 ~ $ ps -ef | grep pulse
rysiek    6827     1  0 13:44 ?        00:00:00 /usr/bin/pulseaudio --start


In my system settings -> Audio I've got "HDA Nvidia (ALC887 Analog) as the preferred device.

Regards,
Richard.

Phonon is the KDE sound system. The equalizer required additions to Phonon in order to be able to function, and these additions are only part of KDE Trunk ( to be 4.4 ) at this time.

You may need to install "libflashsupport" On your system to enable Flash to support Pulseaudio. Note that it is not recommended to use Pulseaudio with KDE at this time.

You may need to install "libflashsupport" On your system to enable Flash to support Pulseaudio. Note that it is not recommended to use Pulseaudio with KDE at this time.

Or you may not. I don't know Sabayon, but in Fedora, F9 needed it, I think F10 needed it, F11 doesn't.

Note that it is not recommended to use Pulseaudio with KDE at this time.

I and many others use PA without any problems whatsoever, but an equal number find it problematic, so the old 'YMMV' definitely applies with PA. I you do have PA and find it gives problems, don't remove it. That causes many more problems. Try to configure it, first (https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora- ... 01933.html might help) and if you still can't get it to work, disable it instead of removing it.

annew wrote:[...] disable it instead of removing it.

Do you have any guide or hints on to do this?

A guy at work tried setting up PulseAudio on our debian workstations, and the only way I found to “fix” sound again, is to purge everything related to pulseaudio and reboot.

edit: (Oh, and why keep it installed if you're not using it?)

First the hint to disable it is for Gnome and I don't use Gnone, I am here - on KDE. Where can I disable it?

I did uninstall it, but the KMix would complain it cannot work without PA. So I had to use "alsamixer" to control the volume. Don't know how Gentoo/Sabayon guys had it configured, PA and KMix must be linked toghether.
With PA uninstalled I could get sound working somewhat properly while I was logged in, but after a reboot the sound was completely gone.

(Oh, and why keep it installed if you're not using it?)

I had to reinstall PA because I lost all sounds.

I can see Phenon is available in the Portage tree, but it doesn't seem to fully integrated into the system.

Code: Select all

*  kde-base/phonon-kde
      Latest version available: 4.3.2
      Latest version installed: 4.3.1
      Size of files: 7,159 kB
      Homepage:      http://phonon.kde.org
      Description:   Phonon KDE Integration
      License:       GPL-2

*  media-sound/phonon
      Latest version available: 4.4_pre20090520
      Latest version installed: 4.4_pre20090520
      Size of files: 569 kB
      Homepage:      http://phonon.kde.org
      Description:   KDE multimedia API
      License:       LGPL-2.1

*  x11-libs/qt-phonon
      Latest version available: 4.5.3
      Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ]
      Size of files: 122,445 kB
      Homepage:      http://qt.nokia.com/
      Description:   The Phonon module for the Qt toolkit
      License:       || ( LGPL-2.1 GPL-3 )



When will Phenon be fully available in KDE? Are we in the middle of a development stage?

Regards,
Richard

sandsmark wrote:annew wrote:
[...] disable it instead of removing it.

Do you have any guide or hints on to do this?

I can't find the message that defined this, but I'll continue to look and come back with details if I find it.

richlion wrote: did uninstall it, but the KMix would complain it cannot work without PA. So I had to use "alsamixer" to control the volume. Don't know how Gentoo/Sabayon guys had it configured, PA and KMix must be linked toghether.

PA is a layer above alsa, to enable applications to access the sound system at the same time. If alsa is broken PA can't work, and kmix is only giving you access to the volume controls and such-like. There is a page of tips for troubleshooting PA at http://fedoraunity.org/Members/fenris02 ... rkarounds/ which may help a number of people.

PA is above alsa? Thanks very much for the hint, I'll keep searching.

Your issue may have been that KDE Applications detected that Pulseaudio was available on startup and thus enabled what Pulseaudio specific functionality they had. When Pulseaudio became unavailable when you uninstalled it this broke. This is probably what caused KMix problems.

It is also possible that they deliberately did not compile in support for ALSA / OSS into KMix since they assumed Pulseaudio would always be available.

In openSUSE I found that the only way to get Flash to use ALSA correctly was to remove libflashsupport otherwise it used Pulseaudio, which tried ( and pretty much always failed ) to gain complete control over the audio device.

Phonon has been fully available since the release of KDE 4.0. You may wish to ensure that you are using the GStreamer backend if you are going to use Pulseaudio since Xine does not work correctly with it.

Thanks Bcooksley,

the problem with Gentoo/Sabayon is that it is very easy to screw up the whole system when remowing/remerging packages, so I'll wait for those guys to come up with some answers how to do it properly without making things worse.

Regards,
Richard

* Make sure in System Settings>Multimedia for each device profile that you put pulse audio to the top of each.
* Install a Pulse Audio Server
* Install a Pulse Audio Volume Control. Like "pavucontrol" ! very important !!
* Adjust sound in Kmix making sure to enable all channels available. Check no mutes, bar the microphone ports.
* Play a song or sounds then whilst...
* Adjust options in Pulse Audio Volume control to get sound channel and volume correct.

Enjoy... sounds of music.

e811 wrote:* Make sure in System Settings>Multimedia for each device profile that you put pulse audio to the top of each.
* Install a Pulse Audio Server
* Install a Pulse Audio Volume Control. Like "pavucontrol" ! very important !!
* Adjust sound in Kmix making sure to enable all channels available. Check no mutes, bar the microphone ports.
* Play a song or sounds then whilst...
* Adjust options in Pulse Audio Volume control to get sound channel and volume correct.

Enjoy... sounds of music.

Thanks, I did all that you mentioned. Pavucontrol doesn't help at all. The problems that still remain:
- launching Amarok and Skype - sound works in both.
- launching a movie in a web browser - I have to close Amarok, no sound in Skype
- launching Amarok when web browser is open - Amarok crashes.
- I have to close the web browser to open Amarok again
- the same problems when I want to watch movies with VLC, I have to close Amarok and no sound comes from Skype
- sound quality - when volume level is > 70% I hear a horrible metalic sound, so I
never can go beyond 70%. Never had these problems before Pulseaudio

PA is a big dissapointment in Gentoo/Sabayon. I have also seen a lot of complaints on
PA in other forums on other Linux distributions.

Since KDE uses Pheonon - I am surprised that Sabayon team used PA with KDE.

Regards,
Richard.

Since you have installed Pulseaudio, you need to install libflashsupport as well, which ( at least on SUSE ) makes Flash uses Pulseaudio.

richlion wrote:

e811 wrote:* Make sure in System Settings>Multimedia for each device profile that you put pulse audio to the top of each.
* Install a Pulse Audio Server
* Install a Pulse Audio Volume Control. Like "pavucontrol" ! very important !!
* Adjust sound in Kmix making sure to enable all channels available. Check no mutes, bar the microphone ports.
* Play a song or sounds then whilst...
* Adjust options in Pulse Audio Volume control to get sound channel and volume correct.

Enjoy... sounds of music.

Thanks, I did all that you mentioned. Pavucontrol doesn't help at all. The problems that still remain:
- launching Amarok and Skype - sound works in both.
- launching a movie in a web browser - I have to close Amarok, no sound in Skype
- launching Amarok when web browser is open - Amarok crashes.
- I have to close the web browser to open Amarok again
- the same problems when I want to watch movies with VLC, I have to close Amarok and no sound comes from Skype
- sound quality - when volume level is > 70% I hear a horrible metalic sound, so I
never can go beyond 70%. Never had these problems before Pulseaudio

PA is a big dissapointment in Gentoo/Sabayon. I have also seen a lot of complaints on
PA in other forums on other Linux distributions.

Since KDE uses Pheonon - I am surprised that Sabayon team used PA with KDE.

Regards,
Richard.

You need to now set all your apps to use Pulse and not steal the hardware slot pulseaudio needs.

Alternately, and especially because this user uses Skype, they may wish to completely remove Pulseaudio as Skype does not work correctly with it.