Audio Error

[Mark M Lambert]

On Thu, 30 Oct 2008 07:28:50 +0000, "Simon Ives"
<simon at simonives.info> said:
> Hi All. Today I discovered a little audio error that I hadn't noticed
> before. Perhaps this has only just occured as I'm using 8.10 so there
> are daily (or almost) updates.
>
> Some applications simply do not play any audio.  I've just tried an
> mp3 in audacious, nothing.  I tried hovering the mouse over the file
> in Nautilus, nothing.  But the same file plays fine in vlc.  AVI files
> play fine in xine but not the default mplayer.
>
> When I go to System -> Preferences -> Sound and select test under
> Music and Movies: Sound Playback I receive the following error:
>
> audiotestsrc wave=sine freq=512 ! audioconvert ! audioresample !
> gconfaudiosink profile=music: Failed to connect: Connection refused
>
> That's using Pulse Audio.  If I select OSS I receive:
>
> audiotestsrc wave=sine freq=512 ! audioconvert ! audioresample !
> gconfaudiosink profile=music: Could not open audio device for
> playback. Device is being used by another application.
>
> If I select ALSA I receive:
>
> audiotestsrc wave=sine freq=512 ! audioconvert ! audioresample !
> gconfaudiosink profile=music: Could not open audio device for playback
>
> I'm not quite sure what's going on here as sound is certainly working
> in some applications.
> --


Simon, I had this problem a few weeks ago but it seems to have gone away
with one of the updates. From memory the fault is in Pulseaudio
connecting to ALSA. You can get the sound working again if you kill
pulseaudio and restart the server. There was bit of discussion on
Launchpad (didn't bookmark it) and someone posted a script to restart
Pulse. VLC works because it doesn't use the ALSA connectors. Here's the
script. copy and paste it into a file, then set the file's permissions
to execute. Run the script, then wait for the zap! noise (about 20
seconds delay).
As I said, it is fixed on my system, so do bit of a Google 
and you might find a permanent fix rather than this workaround.


#!/bin/bash
# fix for PulseAudio auto-start broken

sleep 8
killall -9 pulseaudio
sleep 5 pulseaudio&
sleep 5
paplay
/usr/lib/openoffice/share/gallery/sounds/space.wav