Running KDE 4.8.5 on Mint 13. In the system settings, manage notifications, under player settings tab, if I have "Use the KDE sound system" checked, I get no system notification sounds. If I set it to use the external player "mplayer" it works. Any ideas why the built-in system isn't working?

no ideas, couple q's

is this an upgrade? clean install?

if up then did sound previously work?

does the phonon sound test in systemsettings work?

It's a clean install over an older version. So, it should show as a clean install, except that the /home partition remained, so there could be incompatible settings in some rc file lurking somewhere, I suppose.

Sound previously worked in the former install, which was KDE 12.

The sound test works with both the built-in and the manual "mplayer" setting. FYI, my phonon backend is VLC, as there were memory leak problems with gstreamer when I unplugged my USB camera.

create and try as a new user

Fascinating. I created a new user from the user management dialog in system settings. I logged out and logged in as that user. What I got was a completely blank blue screen with no task bar, no icons... nothing other than the default mint welcome window (which wasn't useful). Had to ctrl-alt-del to log out. Is there something wrong with the setup for new users that they aren't getting assigned any window managers? How do I fix this?

Never mind. I figured it out. So, I logged in as the new user, and the sound works fine with the default KDE sound driver. So it looks like one of my settings files. Any idea where to look?

Another interesting point. In my .kde/share/config path, I have a file called phonondevicesrc. It has a lot of entries. Several of them are for my sound card, and they seem to be the same settings. Most of them are for my USB camera, which is hot-pluggable. It appears that every time I plug in or unplug the camera, a new entry is made in this file. Could that be interfering with the sound?

xmanmonk wrote:Never mind. I figured it out. So, I logged in as the new user, and the sound works fine with the default KDE sound driver. So it looks like one of my settings files. Any idea where to look?

try renaming /.kde/share/config/knotifyrc

Okay, I set the notification back to built-in, mv'ed the knotify file to oldknotify, created an empty text file on the desktop and deleted it. No sound. Emptied the trash. Still no sound. I then went back into notification settings, adjusted the volume down, then up again and applied the settings (this created a new knotify file). Created a text file on the desktop and deleted it. No sound. Emptied the trash. No sound. Set it back to built-in and applied. Created a text file on the desktop and deleted it. I got sound. Emptied the trash, and I got sound again. So, doesn't look like the problem is in the knotify file.

Is it possible that the problem is with my usb camera? I noticed that the system things it has a sound card in it (probably has a mic built-in), but I don't use it. When I hot plug/unplug it, I get a window asking me if I want the system to forget about it. I always say no and ask it to not ask me again, but it always does.

Correction. The one that worked was when I set it back to "external" not to built-in. Sorry 'bout that. Not enough sleep...

I would suggest making sure the correct sound card is the preferred device in the Phonon settings for all categories, particularly Notifications.

Thanks for your reply. I can't count how many times I've checked those. And I click on every single category to make sure they're set right. They are all set to the internal sound driver with the exception of video recording, which is set to the USB camera.

Now, I'm checking again, and it has changed from my built-in sound card to PulseAudio Sound Server. Could this be a problem?

This indicates that Pulseaudio is being started by something on your system - and the needed modules KDE needs Pulseaudio to have loaded are not present (or your installation is missing Pulseaudio support).

Can you please check to see if "pulseaudio" is running?

It appears so:

mannex@Leviathan:~$ ps aux | grep pulseaudio
mannex 2101 2.2 0.5 239268 9376 ? S<l Oct27 57:36 /usr/bin/pulseaudio --start --log-target=syslog
mannex 11127 0.0 0.0 4648 820 pts/1 S+ 07:11 0:00 grep --color=auto pulseaudio
mannex@Leviathan:~$

Just installed paman (Pulse Audio Manager) and it works fine. Also installed the Pulse Audio VLC module, which may have been the problem because I'm using VLC as my backend. Thanks!