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Try as I might, I can't get menu sounds and audio playback to work, it's either one or the other, with pre-Eden on Ubuntu 11.10. I've been going through all sorts of shenanigans but nothing has worked out for me yet. I'm using a GT430 and audio is being routed over HDMI to my receiver. Right now it's set up so DTS, DD and PCM are all getting passed to the receiver just fine.

I've found that if I change one setting in the pulse config file I can have menu sounds working, but then there's nothing I have found that makes audio playback work. In fact, I've run into issues where only root could see any audio devices via aplay, although xbmc running under my user account does play menu sounds.

I decided to compare my settings against XBMCFreak's latest live installation, and noticed that it doesn't even use Pulse. Since the only app that needs audio on this system is XBMC, do I even need Pulse Audio installed? Would I be better off without it, or is there some advantage to it?

Good! In fact, potentially awesome. But still a bit buggy. Any version below 1.0 shud be treated with caution (as shud any ALSA pre 1.0.24). However they're abt 5 good chaps, incl a Canonical employee, working on it vigorously so it's getting better every day. I've been messing abt with it for abt a year. I'm now on Ubuntu 11.10 x 32, and I've come down to always commenting out the UDEV auto detect features in default.pa and writing my own sink lines - that's what gets me 100pct reliability on selecting and combining the 5 audio outputs my HTPC has. I also use pavucontrol exclusively - never the gnome applet.

I use Audacious media player to test for valid "aplay -L" devices (valid=ones that give me sound) - it's gotta great output section, so u play music and quickly/easily select every Alsa output from a drop down list to test and I then write valid ones into default.pa.

If you're neither combining sinks/outputs, nor networking the sound on your HTPC then yu don't need Pulse - but I don't think there's any reason to uninstall it. XBMC (like Audacious) has the ability to just bypass it and talk directly to ALSA.

Cheers
T

PS I never bothered with system sounds...doan care.

Shud?

"Pulse audio is awesome, I mean it's not quite there yet but we're working on it really hard."

Is pretty much the same thing as when microsoft says

"The NEXT version of windows is going to be awesome. Stable and bug free. We're working really hard".

It's been a nightmare since it first was forced upon the world ages ago. I run XBMC on bare Debian and have just ever installed ALSA.

@darkscout

hehe....If there's one piece of software gteed to raise controversy then it's Pulseaudio. I started with it on Ubuntu 10.04 (think it was with Alsa 1.0.19?) and it was truly hopeless - hardly any features worked properly and I did my head in trying to make it work as promised. But it really has moved on.

Version 1.1 can be called reliable (really!) but I would reiterate about the need to set up your own sinks - UDEV auto detect only seems to get it right on very basic setups and so I assume many users are left 'soundless' - and simply scream at Pulse. However, setting up sinks takes a bit of time and knowledge and I understand not everyone wants to do that, or even expects to have to.

I agree that there's not much point of it in XBMC (though do I use it to combine analog outputs) but for general network audio use it's excellent...now.

T

BTW - I love your graph graphic, had me ROFL - can I steal it? I plan to add default.pa and smb.conf to it though

I've tried to set up a sink based on the information I've found for the 430, but the module fails to load the and the message gives me no details. When I do that, I gain menu sounds, but lose the important stuff, and that's what also causes my user account to not see any devices under aplay, but root still does. None of that makes any sense to me.

Also, since I added:
options snd-hda-intel enable_msi=0 probe_mask=0x108
to take care of my audio initialization problems that caused video issues it's altered the way my devices show up in aplay -l and aplay -L. It used to be that the hdmi output was card 1, device 9, now it's card 0, device 3. And I have no NVidia devices showing up in XBMC's audio settings, only a custom setting will work. I still get an error in the log file indicating a problem initializing audio, it tries hw:0,3 followed by a string of hex values, and says it can't be found and it's switching to hw:0,3. Everything seems fine, and I can't figure out where those hex values come in, but it bugs me that it's happening.

I've used linux for various things for a decade now, sound is one of the worst things I've dealt with. In XBMC there are two sound device definitions, and a third hidden one for menu sounds. It just makes it so difficult for anyone to figure out what to do. Seeing that the live install appears to be far more intuitive without pulse makes me think that that is the best way to go. But I also fear making any significant changes to the audio on my system because if I lose all audio I might be forced to reinstall the OS to get it working again.

Need more details than that to take a stab at what's wrong (versions/aplays etc) It sounds to me like you could have an Alsa/hardware problem but 1.0.24 works fine with Intel HDA. Yu must check to see which of the aplay -L list of devices can actually play audible sound - use Audacious cos it's an easy way and work back from that.

T

Try plughw:0,3.

Or a debug log.
Or the output of aplay -l
Or the output of "id $(whoami)"
Or any number of things that would help us diagnose the problem.

When you have a problem with your call do you phone your mechanic and say "Well it's doing this and this and this"? Or do you let him see the raw data?


http://insanecoding.blogspot.com/2009/06...sorry.html

Well if you want to have a crack at it, I'd appreciate the help. I'll provide you what info I can:
Ubuntu 11.10, kernel 3.0.0-14, 64-bit, Phenom II X4, 8GB ram, GT430 video card
alsa 1.0.24, PulseAudio 1.0, nvidia 280.13, XBMC pre-eden 12/22

This is the old output of aplay:

and now with the snd-hda-intel options it shows:

If I attempt to set a module-alsa-sink link line I get the following error:
Failed to load module "module-alsa-sink" (argument: "device=hw:0,3"): initialization failed.

hw:0,3 plays audio just fine. It's what I'm using in XBMC right now. Before I added the probe_mask option I was using plughw 1,9, and that worked except that every time I started watching a video for the first 5 seconds the video was real choppy, while the audio was smooth, and the xbmc log showed problems initializing audio. It looked like it was trying to initialize pulse while going ahead and using alsa. Here's a log file from when I was working on that problem. I'll see about generating a debug log now and see how the audio errors compare. If you look at 18:40:16 you'll see a lot of debug messages regarding Pulse, then at 18:40:18 it appears to switch to alsa. Now the video plays fine, but I do get similar error messages regarding the custom device, but I haven't viewed a debug log since fixing the probe_mask.

darkscout Wrote:When you have a problem with your call do you phone your mechanic and say "Well it's doing this and this and this"? Or do you let him see the raw data?

I wasn't necessarily looking for help on fixing the issues, rather than checking to see if pulse is worth it (which I'm still thinking it's not). But since TiberiusT offered, I've thrown up the data.

I've spent a ton of time on this, first was fixing the video stuttering problem, since I got that resolved but still see error messages, I've tried poking around the audio settings a bit. I've googled for info on the GT430 and pulse audio, and tried a few dozen different threads highlighting default.pa settings, asoundrc files, etc. It's a giant mess as far as I can tell.

Here's the contents of eld#3.0:

Pastebin.com is down at the moment, but here's what looks to be the relevant section of the debug log. Comparing this to the old one makes me think pulse was never working quite right, and rather that it was just taking more time fail over to alsa previously.

Had a good look but apart from the obvious of Pulse not fetching the stream nothing stands out. However your "options snd-hda-intel enable_msi=0 probe_mask=0x108" seems ugly - I can't believe yu need to do that.

I also have a GT430 and haven't had any problems with it in 11.10. However I have an ancient receiver which doesn't take HDMI so I use SPDIF for multichannel and then the HDMI into the TV for Stereo only - all is well...

A few things that I've noticed/had to do on my way which might help:

- I was on the XBMC unstable ppa most of last year and saw Pulse get integrated but I did have some fits along the way - I had to go back a couple of times. I'm not sure it's fully and properly integrated. Remember you're using beta software!
- Pulse does not always like a particular Alsa sink - it seems happier with some than others. A bit of experimentation is required. Using pacmd yu can load them in manually to test if they load. And if you're gonna manually load sinks, I find it much more reliable to turn off UDEV in default.pa and load the sinks in the last lines.
- AFAIK, XBMC system sounds go by default into the Alsa default tunnel which is different from your XBMC audio sink - that's probably why yu can't hear both.
- I'm not sure yu need Pulse with what you're trying to do. What happens if u ignore it in XBMC and just use ALSA sinks?

T

Without "options snd-hda-intel enable_msi=0 probe_mask=0x108" video would be very choppy for the first 5 seconds. I can't explain it, but I could not find any other way to fix it, now it's mostly fine, sometimes there's a momentary pause after less than a second, but before it was very bad. The parameters are based on what I found in various other threads.

I don't know what is and isn't a PulseAudio sink, and there are no audio options that work for me in XBMC aside from the Custom setting I'm using. There might be other values I can put in Custom that might work, but I don't know what they are. The only way I know to disable pulse is to rename the executable, as just killing it and restarting xbmc caused pulse to start back up and if I remember right I had no audio from video files when I tried that. So I don't know how I can work around it.

I'll try pacmd, I wasn't aware of that app before you mentioned it.

I certainly think I can get by without Pulse. I just fear removing it and subsequently losing all audio and not being able to get alsa working without it. I've had bad experiences with linux audio in the past, much like samba and X11, once you got it working, even if it's not perfect, it's kind of scary to mess with in case you totally break it.

I'm looking in pacmd now and I see 0 cards, and the only sink is the dummy output. If I enter "load-module module-alsa-sink device hw:0,3" it then appears to load the sink correctly as it appears attached to the nVidia card, however when I put that line in default.pa pulse fails to load and I get that error message in syslog mentioned above. Once I exit pacmd it kills pulse and I get those errors in the log and I can't restart pacmd. I still get that error when trying /etc/init.d/pulseaudio restart. I've also tried service pulseaudio stop and start and that continues to error out, even though none of my pulse config files have changed.