Hi everyone,

I'm having problems with this utility called the Tea Cooker (kteatime package from the repos). I hear no sounds when the timer goes off! I've checked the "Configure Notifications" dialog box of Tea Cooker, everything seems fine but when I click the button to test the sound /usr/share/sounds/KDE-Sys-App-Message.ogg, I hear nothing. It's as if my sound card is mute. I also tried Tomatoid plasmoid: its Notifications sounds are clearly audible (though I don't like that it counts break time as soon as a 25-minute-long tomato expires, and that is why I got rid of it).

1. So why can't I hear the sounds? What is it that needs to be settled?
2. Could it be Phonon backends? Somewhere the volume is set too low...

I'm on a Debian 7.3 KDE desktop, 32-bit architecture. I have kmixer and alsamixer installed. I have the Master control of the volume maxed out, still can't hear Notification sound. Hearing music on YouTube for example or an audio file via VLC player is fine. I also have Clementine installed as a music player though hardly any mp3s.

I loaded Kteatime and experienced the same even though the sound test in configuration works so I would suggest posting a bug report on bugs.kde.org

Do any other parts of the notification (such as the text notification) work?

bcooksley wrote:Do any other parts of the notification (such as the text notification) work?

for me yes

bcooksley wrote:Do any other parts of the notification (such as the text notification) work?

Yes, the text notification in the system tray works although it's barely noticeable, that's why I need a sound, an alarm or something of that sort.
Also, I managed to temporarily fix the issue. After some Google searching/reading, I bumped into a forum thread about users complaining that the VLC Phonon backends in Debian Wheezy (7.3) are broken. So I uninstalled that package and put Gstreamer-backends in its place - voila!

Next, I decided to clean and update the system of everything related to VLC to avoid future problems due to that broken Phonon backend. I cleared (apt-get purge vlc-data vlc) VLC, added the wheezy backports to the sources.list and installed the newest version of the player as instructed on their website. However this version of VLC couldn't play *.WMA files. I suspect this has something to do with the Phonon backends. Since I was at a dead end and I needed to play my lecture recordings at 1.5x playback speed, I opted for mplayer and smplayer. I installed these packages from the repos (Synaptik package manager) and smplayer works fine! AND I can still hear the sound of the timer going off!

So for these reasons, I'm signing this topic as "SOLVED".

Okay - the functioning of the text notifications was a clear indicator that KTeaTime was firing off the notification correctly.
Thanks for posting the Phonon related solution - as a warning to others, please note that the GStreamer backend is broken under certain versions of Kubuntu. Rather unfortunate to hear that VLC is broken on Debian.

I've contacted a Debian KDE developer - the backend is working fine as far as they're aware.
Did / Does your system use Pulseaudio by any chance?

google01103 wrote:I loaded Kteatime and experienced the same even though the sound test in configuration works so I would suggest posting a bug report on bugs.kde.org

I just want to mention that kteatime's sound notification (set to "/usr/share/sounds/KDE-Sys-App-Message.ogg") works fine here.
openSUSE 13.1, KDE 4.12.3, phonon-backend-vlc-0.7.1, VLC 2.1.4.

wolfi323 wrote:

google01103 wrote:I loaded Kteatime and experienced the same even though the sound test in configuration works so I would suggest posting a bug report on bugs.kde.org

I just want to mention that kteatime's sound notification (set to "/usr/share/sounds/KDE-Sys-App-Message.ogg") works fine here.
openSUSE 13.1, KDE 4.12.3, phonon-backend-vlc-0.7.1, VLC 2.1.4.

That's pretty much what I'm running (except 4.12.97) but I only get the sound if I change to mplayer, will test later when I install 4.13

If the sound doesn't play except with a certain backend, can you please try testing using other applications which use the same underlying technology (VLC itself for the VLC backend for instance).

bcooksley wrote:If the sound doesn't play except with a certain backend, can you please try testing using other applications which use the same underlying technology (VLC itself for the VLC backend for instance).

VLC player was giving problems so I un-istalled VLC-phonon backend AND vlc player itself - it didn't play *.wma files and shut down itself every time I told it to play. In it's place I'm using mplayer2 with smplayer front-end that I installed from the repos (via Synaptic Package Manager). I then realized that Clementine had become unstable, every time I tried to edit the tags of any given file (whether *.mp3 or *.wma), it would shut itself.

I think there's some conflicting dependencies due to deb.multimedia repo. I tried installing the latest version of VLC as instructed on their website but it somehow clashes with the older version's data, stored somewhere... Anyway!

Okay - thanks anyway.