[And1.G]

Hello,

As described in the title, I intend to use my Asus Xonar DX (PCIe) sound card with pulseaudio on Arch Linux with a AMD A45300 on a A75 (Hudson-D3) mainboard. Onboard Audio is disabled but works perfectly together with Pulseaudio and XBMC.
When I uninstall Pulseaudio, I get perfect audio output with Alsa from XBMC. But since I like the network features, I want to use Pulseaudio. The system is a dedicated HTPC. For convenience reasons I start lxdm which automatically logs in my xbmc user and runs xbmc-standalone.


Debug Log
First I have a look if the right audio output is selected, then I play a stereo .wav-file from my home directory.
XBMC thinks that it is now playing the file, on the bottom I see the play time. I get no audio output. The standard bars-spectrum visualisation stays all flat in the background but this seems to be normal with Pulseaudio.
After 20 seconds of no audio I stop playback.
I quit XBMC.

Pulseaudio is getting started by the xbmc-standalone launcher:
ps output:

Code:

xbmc       520  0.1  0.2 500472  8148 ?        S<l  18:29   0:00 /usr/bin/pulseaudio --start

When I log in with ssh and simply run "paplay Smoke\ On\ The\ Water.wav" (Same file as in XBMC) the song comes out of the speakers.

Same steps with the onboard audio device enabled in BIOS and selected in XBMC makes perfect audio output. When I switch to the Xonar card, there is immediately no longer output from the onboard card but also not from the Xonar. Switching back to onboard reenables audio output.

Software versions:
XBMC version 12.2 Git:Unknown (Compiled: Jul 26 2013) from the Arch Linux repository.
Pulseaudio version 4.0-2 from the Arch Linux repository
Linux xbmc 3.10.7-1-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Thu Aug 15 11:55:34 CEST 2013 x86_64 GNU/Linux

I also compiled the git version yesterday to make sure this is not a bug which was already fixed but had the same effects.

Can anyone please help me get this to run? I mean if Alsa works, Pulseaudio works from shell and with a different card from XBMC I think it can't be that much wrong what I am doing here...

[wsnipex]

it has been stated a lot on these forums that pulse support in xbmc currently is rather broken.

[And1.G]

Well that's a pity... I found several threads about Pulseaudio, that's right. But most of them were either rather old or about HDMI or digital audio.
And I thought since the onboard sound is working it can't be that hard to fix this...
Are there any intentions to fix pulseaudio support or does this have rather low priority? I thought with the AudioEngine Pulseaudio was gaining more support?


And now it's getting really weird. I installed the current beta fglrx (catalyst) driver and it now works with pulseaudio? Well even though I don't like the proprietary driver, I appreciate this "fix"
Edit:
That was too early. Installing fglrx just enabled HDMI output and since it's getting late and I am kind of tired, I did not realize the sound was actually not coming out of the 5.1 speakers but from those two nice big stereo speakers I attached to the TV....

Edit #2:
So I found out the desired sound card was not set as the default output. So I ran "pacmd set-default-sink 1" to set the second card as default. From now on, I have analog output with the sound card and Pulseaudio from XBMC. But since I am no longer able to switch to HDMI output from within XBMC I think there is a problem with the device chooser.