Hi, using kubuntu oneiric/KDE SC 4.8RC2 here.

I always suffered sound config issues since kde4.0 days.
Having two HDMI audio devices embedded in my two graphic cards and the internal ICH10 Intel audio controller, I need to use only the latter, since I have no HDMI enabled speakers.

Every now and then, after KDE startup, I had to go to phonon settings and manually switch to the intel Audio sound card, just because KDE put one of my two HDMI audio devices as the default one.

Today the problem got worse.
Now, albeit kmix being no more able to display any other control apart the card's master channel and playback streams (kde ~4.7.x onwards), if I change my default sound card with "kcmshell4 kcm_phonon", KDE doesn't even save the change. If I close and reopen the KCM window I always get the wrong sound card (HDMI).
It's very weird.

Anyway for the time being, the only application suffering this misbehavior is amarok, giving me no sound.

Things done so far:
Checked file permissions in ~/.kde and /var/tmp/kdecache-$USER
Entirely removed ~/.kde and /var/tmp/kdecache-$USER

Any clues?

Have you tried removing ~/.kde4/share/config/phonondevicesrc outside KDE?

bcooksley wrote:Have you tried removing ~/.kde4/share/config/phonondevicesrc outside KDE?

Yes, I removed it. "kcmshell4 kcm_phonon" didn't create a new one, though. Do I have to logout/login?

I believe the file will only be created when needed. However you could try logging out to ensure the settings in it are fully applied.

Another thing to check - does your system use Pulseaudio?

For me too Amarok does not play sounds, although if I test the Music-device from Phonon, it works OK. I don't use pulseaudio.
I tried Amarok pre-release as well as stable 2.5.0, Phonon backend is VLC from openSUSE unstable repository.

At the end I managed to work around the issue.
First I disabled the hdmi audio devices by blacklisting "snd_hda_codec_hdmi" in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf.
Done that phonon forgot about hdmi but started to forcibly use digital iec895 output of the card, hence with no sound since I only use analog output.
Eventually the problem was pulseaudio. I had to force pulseaudio to use analog output by issuing

Code: Select all

pacmd set-card-profile output:analog-stereo+input:analog-stereo

Now "everything" works except phonon settings displaying only a mere "pulseaudio server" as the available sound device.

Anyway, Kmix keeps to display only the master channel and playback streams.
In the pre 4.7 days it worked as expected, letting the user control every available channel (master, headphone, pcm and so on).

These settings are now handled by pulseaudio, but you need to install pavucontrol to handle that.

@Frasty: Which version of Kubuntu are you using? It appears that the Kubuntu packages have a defect if you just see "Pulseaudio server".

(Try running "start-pulseaudio-kde" if you have it available - then opening the Phonon KCM and it should then allow you to manage your Pulseaudio settings).

bcooksley wrote:@Frasty: Which version of Kubuntu are you using? It appears that the Kubuntu packages have a defect if you just see "Pulseaudio server".

(Try running "start-pulseaudio-kde" if you have it available - then opening the Phonon KCM and it should then allow you to manage your Pulseaudio settings).

I'am running 11.10. Anyway after upgrading to 4.8 from backports I've found that Phonon KCM no more lists "pulseaudio server" and now it shows "Internal audio card" or, sort of.. I'm not in front of my pc.

start-pulseaudio-kde must have been run once, since module-device-manager and module-x11-bell are already loaded.

So it seems all ok I guess.

bcooksley wrote:It appears that the Kubuntu packages have a defect if you just see "Pulseaudio server".

That is a rather silly assumption, there is a vast amount of things that could cause the KDE listing module to disappear. The by far most frequent cause is actually that PulseAudio died at one point or another, which will not reload the module due to a design defect in PulseAudio (though upstream plans to sanitize this, so that an auto-restarted PA will also reload the appropriate modules or something).

FWIW, since forever ago you cannot install PA on Kubuntu without getting the KDE device module

Hm, I was not aware of that defect in Pulseaudio. All distributions i've encountered cause the appropriate Pulseaudio modules to be loaded - so it seemed that the OP was missing that. Of course what is more likely that Pulseaudio crashed at some point in this process and was restarted...

I'm having the same problem. The phonon settings won't save the audio hardware setup and while I can hear sound fine for notifications/etc. I cannot get it to play audio for Amarok.

This is also after an upgrade to KDE 4.8 through backports.

I upgraded because the previous version of Amarok available in ubuntu didn't scrobble, this version does, but I get no sound, lol.

pavucontrol is not showing anything when Amarok is playing.

It may be that the sound is legitimately playing over my HDMI port, but even if I blacklist that it's probably going to try to direct audio to my speakers (rather than my usb headset) and I really want to be able to switch the audio with pavucontrol like I was able to do a few hours ago before I upgraded to KDE 4.8.

And since the upgrade did fix the scrobbling problem in Amarok I'd prefer not to downgrade to fix the sound issue.

I get this in the amarok console output, it seems like it's saying it lacks for an audio device setting or something

phonon-xine does not support splitting of audio or video streams into multiple outputs. The sink node is already connected to AudioDataOutput(0x1f97720)
WARNING: Phonon::createPath: Cannot connect Phonon::MediaObject ( no objectName ) to Phonon::AudioOutput ( no objectName ).

EDIT:

Simple solution, not sure why I forgot about trying gstreamer when xine breaks...

sudo apt-get install phonon-backend-gstreamer
kcmshell4 kcm_phonon
Switched backend to gstreamer, relogged and it was working fine with amarok and everything else.

Hi, I have the same problem. Every time I select the Internal Audio card, when I get back it has switched to hdmi (my gpu card). I tried everything mentioned above and nothing worked. The problem is I can't use Amarok, when I play a song, it crashes because of this.
My distro is opensuse 12.1 x64, kde 4.8.

naervaer wrote:Hi, I have the same problem.

Did you read the thread?

bcooksley wrote:@Frasty: Which version of Kubuntu are you using? It appears that the Kubuntu packages have a defect if you just see "Pulseaudio server".

(Try running "start-pulseaudio-kde" if you have it available - then opening the Phonon KCM and it should then allow you to manage your Pulseaudio settings).

Hello,
it seems that I have the same problem like Frasty. I also changed the settings in phonon but it happens that the audio card get switched while I have an active playback (youtube, amarok...).

If I try to run "start-pulseaudio-kde" I got this error:

Code: Select all

21:44:08 kenshi@destiny ~ start-pulseaudio-kde
N: [pulseaudio] main.c: User-configured server at {bb613621feef82d686edde0046e9bcea}unix:/home/kenshi/.pulse/bb613621feef82d686edde0046e9bcea-runtime/native, which appears to be local. Probing deeper.
I: [pulseaudio] main.c: Start des Daemons erfolgreich.
Fehlgeschlagen: Modulinitialisierung fehlgeschlagen


In your post u wrote that it is possible that some packages are broken. Do you know which ones and which versions? How can I debug to find the real problem? Should I use the workaround to fix the problem?

Thanks for any help and sorry for my bad english,
kenshi

PS: I also managed out that booting an older kernel 3.2 sometimes works great and KMix displays all audio channels.