Intrepid Sound Problems
Daniel T Chen
crimsun at fungus.sh.nu
Sat Nov 15 23:18:08 UTC 2008
On 11/14/2008 03:43 PM, Karl Larsen wrote:
> I did a search today to try and get sound back on my new Intrepid. I
> see this is a MAJOR problem and there are 25 web pages full of
> mis-information.
>
> First, the sound was perfect yesterday. Turned off the laptop and
> this morning when it booted up the little speaker's had a red X over
> them. I cleared that by right clicking and setting it right. No idea how
> it got changed.
>
> I tried the w32codecs which was worthless, turned of PulseAudio
> worthless, and began to wonder what is going on.
>
> I did get some drivers for Firefox to view U-Tube things and tried
> to install a special driver that apt-get could not find which was
> supposed to fix the sound problem. I will continue to Google but will
> avoid all bug reports because they are VERY confusing.
>
> Karl
>
I empathize; audio on Linux is a difficult problem space in general.
That said, to effectively troubleshoot, please provide as much debugging
information to the bug triagers as possible. There is a nice script to
gather this information for you and upload it to a pastebin. Please see
the http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-info.sh script referenced from
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingSoundProblems.
Another course of action is to open an answers.launchpad.net question.
Be sure to attach the alsa-info.sh output.
Now, to un-muddy the problem space a bit. Firstly, w{32,64}codecs isn't
going to affect your sound driver. If your speaker icon in GNOME's
notification area has a red 'X' over it, it's not a codec problem but
one of infrastructure. Normally this boils down to two possibilities in
recent Ubuntu releases (hardy and intrepid), namely either ALSA or
PulseAudio is the culprit. (In non-trivial circumstances, both ALSA and
PulseAudio are to blame.) Secondly, libflashsupport is obsolete in
intrepid, so it's forcibly removed during a full upgrade process.
Perhaps a diagram for Ubuntu 8.10 will help. We'll start at the top of
the audio stack (where applications like your speaker icon reside).
-----------------------
Applications
-----------------------
PulseAudio
-----------------------
ALSA userspace library
-----------------------
ALSA kernel driver
-----------------------
Sound hardware
-----------------------
One of the many problems with the "look online and attempt to use what's
documented in twenty-five scattershot wikis, blogs, forum posts"
approach is that you get a lot of misinformation (as you stated blithely
earlier). Quality debugging involves systematically and individually
inspecting each of the five layers diagrammed above. It's utter madness
to try the buckshot approach.
The w{32,64}codecs bit is the applications layer. Your issue needs to
be debugged from the bottom of the stack upward. I recommend not even
bothering with further application tweaking until you've eliminated the
middle two ALSA layers as problems.
A few of us hang out in #alsa and #ubuntu-audio-help on irc.freenode.net
if that's preferable.
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