Debian Multimedia :: Using X To Control Home Stereo
Apr 26, 2015
I have a home media server that usually is running headless, as its only display is our TV. For the last year or so, I've used it as a component in our stereo, running Banshee via tunneling x to a server on either my phone or another computer via ssh. Please note I know that X doesn't handle sound, the idea is that the remote computer controls the media center which is hard-wired into our speakers.
This has worked great with Wheezy for about a year, and for several months with Jessie (up to like the end of February) when I started to have general sound issues with my install. I spent a few months running Ubuntu and now that Jessie's released I re-installed it last night.
Banshee runs great on the local X server- no issues. It also runs acceptably under XServer XSDL on my phone (it won't continue playing songs after the current song ends, unless I re open the X server app and then it sort of wakes up.) But when I try and log in from a remote computer (either another Jessie computer or Ubuntu 14.04.2) it says it's playing but no sound.
Here's what it's saying in the terminal on the Ubuntu computer while it's trying to start playing on the media computer
Code: Select all[Warn 09:39:01.506] DBus support could not be started. Disabling for this session. -
System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object (in `dbus-sharp-glib')
 at DBus.BusG.Init (DBus.Connection conn, DBus.GLib.IOFunc dispatchHandler) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
 at DBus.BusG.Init (DBus.Connection conn) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
 at DBus.BusG.Init () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
 at Banshee.ServiceStack.DBusConnection.Connect (System.String serviceName, Boolean init) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
[Code] ......
This install is running the released Debian 8.0.0 and has the MATE desktop. I really don't have a choice other than Banshee because the majority of my library is encoded as .ogg files and all the metadata is saved in banshee.db as opposed to in the files.
I'm using a CAD u37 usb condenser microphone for some semi-pro voiceover work. My clients insist on stereo audio. On my windows machine, my mic works just fine, but it's not in very very good place for recording (a bit too echoey). So I thought I'd use my netbook running ubuntu.I can plug my mic in, and it does record sound, but there is no available sound profile that allows me to just have two-channels of input. Can I install a driver or edit a file somewhere that lets me have stereo input?
I have some AVI files that are encoded as AVI files with ac52 audio, which I think is surround 5.1 or something channelized, because I am only using my headphone output to some powered speakers and I can't hear the dialog.I thought there would be an easy way to downmix to stereo, did some searching, and tried under audio menu, to get to audio devices and select stereo.But the option is greyed out whether or not a file is loaded.
I can't find the option for 3d sound, such as "Speaker Fill" in Realtek Control Panel for windows. I searched in sound preferences, alsamixer and pavucontrol with no result. 5.1 surround sound for movies is working good, so there is no problem with hardware or compability with ubuntu, I think. What should I do? "Speaker Fill" is very useful option.
Bought a new yamaha receiver and have it hooked up to my pc via a y connector on headphone out.
problem: computer speakers work fine when connected to the same audio output described above. when connecting the audio out to my stereo receiver, there is no sound.
the receiver indicates that it is not receiving a signal.
Ubuntu 11.04, with Myth 0.24 and XBMC 10.1. Hardware is an Asus P8H67-M Pro mobo which I bought specifically because it boasts an optical output, which I need to send 5.1 sound to my receiver.
My plan is to set up MythTV for watching TV, and have it send stereo sound directly to the TV via HDMI. This part is working fine.
And then set up XBMC to play my collection of ripped and recorded video, with the sound always going via optical spdif to the receiver. I did have this working on a prototype (different mobo) but now I have my "final" hardware I can't get this bit to go.
The issue seems to be that the OS is only seeing the Optical output as a stereo device - for example if I go System Settings - Sound I can see two hardware devices - "Digital Stereo HDMI" and "Digital Stereo Duplex (IEC95"
I'm new to this area of Linux, so would really appreciate some pointers - I've spent the last couple of hours reading immensely long threads and not getting any wiser! code...
I'd like to capture streaming audio. Installed Audacity but the mixer toolbar doesn't show a mix or stereo mix dropdown option. So, there's no capture possible. It's not a hardware issue because I do get the stereo mix option in Windows Vista (this is a dual-boot PC). I've spent hours reading about this and there's lots of folks talking, but no solution that I can find. It must have something to do with how ALSA manipulates this particular hardware. I had Fedora 10 installed and had the same problem with it. At this point, it's the only reason I have left for keeping Vista. Note: I have an ancient IBM T23 with Fedora and Audacity. Stereo mix IS an option in the mixer dropdown menu; I can record ok. I'm not going to take the patch cord route (line out to mic in etc) because then I can't hear what's being recorded. And there's got to be an impedance problem that would impair the quality. Maybe someone who's solved this will read my post and comment. No going to hold my breath.
Until recently, when connected my laptop to the stereo via audio out, i had sound coming only from the stereo. I don't know why and when exactly this happened, but now when the stereo is connected, i get sound from the laptop speakers and stereo speakers simultaneously.Is this a bug? I'd like to mute only my laptop speakers but haven't figured out how. I've tried every setting in "sound" or "audio" or whatever it's called in english, but to no avail.Any ideas how to turn off the laptop speakers?
Alright, the lifehacker article about this Acer machine got me interested in revisiting XBMC as a media center. I bought the AR1600-U910H from Newegg and have been struggling for a couple of weeks to get it working correctly. I opted to install a full Ubuntu desktop to utilize the hardware fully with a standalone version of XBMC. I am currently running Lucid with NVIDIA 256.25 (was running 195 series) driver. Switched to 256 because I heard it fixes the no multi-channel output problem. However, sadly I can't get multi-channel out to work. I have the HDMI output going through my Onkyo TX-SR608 receiver for both audio and video. My problem is I can only get stereo sound out while running XBMC (or any application for that matter).
I've upgraded Alsa to 1.0.23. I've installed new Beta 256.25 NVIDIA driver. I've configured Alsa about 28 different times. I'm at my wits end. So, my question is - does anybody having a similar setup with the ION chip (or the Acer Aspire Revo in particular) where they can succesfully get HDMI digital audio pass through to a receiver (or at least digital multi channel out)? The best I've gotten is 2 channel audio, which doesn't do a lot of good on a 5.1 setup. If I would have known getting multichannel audio would be so difficult I would have rethought starting this endeavor. I don't care if I have to do a fresh reinstall of everything - if that means a different version Ubuntu so be it.
I just got a 5.1 Surround sound system and set it up. I found that it was only working as stereo, though (That is, only the two frontal speakers were producing any sound). I made sure everything was not muted in alsamixer and checked that the hardware was set to 5.1 in the Sound Preferences Hardware tab.
I'm using Ubuntu 10.10 64bit and my sound card is an onboard Intel DG41TY, Realtek ALC888VC codec.
I have an issue with the voice channel on certain MKV fikles being really low compared to the music and sound effects. I've found an explanation and solution for Windows for this, but nothing for linux.
[URL]
how to get the same kind of result in smplayer or xine or VLC? For info, playback is fine through headphones - no channel imbalance.
What it says on the tin really. Whenever i set my sound preferences to 5.1 analog surround i get a sort of high-pitched whine/buzz coming through the speakers along with the regular sound, however if i switch to stereo duplex, it vanishes.
I need to know how to setup Ubuntu 10.10 64-bit to record what's called the "stereo" and "mono" mix popular in Windows where it records anything playing out of the speakers. The goal is to play the microphone through the speakers at the same time background music is playing and thus record both. I also need to know how to play the microphone through the speakers.
I've done a search on google and on here regarding my issue and I couldn't see anything.
I have the following audio device;
Code: 00:10.1 Audio device: nVidia Corporation MCP51 High Definition Audio (rev a2) At the moment I have it playing through Analog Stereo Output. (See attached image)
The sound is mostly flawless and I haven't been having troubles with it.
But, because I play audio through my logitech speakers (2 speakers, 1 subwoofer) I should be able to get digital stereo sound shouldn't I?
From the drop down box of the attached image there are two options for Digital Stereo;
Digital Stereo Duplex IEC958 Digital Stereo IEC958 Output + Analog Stereo Input
None of them work for me. Even if I do a restart, I get no sound from Rhythmbox or Firefox.
I use the pulseaudio sound server and I have the PulseAudio device chooser installed. When I had the Digital Stereo Duplex IEC958 selected I used the Volume Meter playback to see if there was any sound coming through. Both left and right showed activity but nothing came through the speakers.
I bought this Radeon 4670 [URL] to improve my video. Although the description on ATI-AMD webpage [URL] specifies that this card can output up to 7.1 audio through HDMI, Sound Controls only shows the stereo and off option. ATI Catalyst does not have any controls for audio. Is there a way to get 5.1 audio enabled? Using 10.04.
When I use my ubuntu computer to watch some movies that are encoded into 5.1 sound I can't hear the voices of the people in the movie. I guess that is because the voices are put on the front speaker and I have connected the computer to an stereo-amplifier.
I mainly use XBMC and have noticed the problem there but I have also tried VLC and noticed the same problem there. In xbmc I checked the box "Downmix multichannel audio to stereo" but it doesn't work.
I use a standard ubuntu 10.04 64-bit install that was upgraded from a 9.10 install.
I am at the end of my tether in trying to get sound setup on my Ubuntu installation. I have tried many different 'fixes' that people have suggested, but none seem to work!
My setup is as follows: > HP Proliant Microserver > Ubuntu 10.10 > Zotac GT210 card > HDMI from GFX card to AV amp > 5GB Ram
What I want to be able to do is:
> Play music from FLAC files I have ripped in either stereo or sudo 5.1 > Play DVD iso files that I have ripped in the audio format found on the original discs (DTS etc)
I have managed to get sound working before, but only in stereo and I couldn't get it working in XBMC (not the sound from the main movie I chose anyway). I have since completely broken the sound after trying various things found on the interweb and cannot get it back.
I'm having a problem with Pulseaudio for quite some time, I already made some topics about it. But still no solution. The thing is, I can't use my keyboard volume control, it's only manipulating my ALSA configuration. Not my main Pulseaudio volume. Here is some information about my sound card:
$ pacmd list-cards Welcome to PulseAudio! Use "help" for usage information. >>> 3 card(s) available. index: 0 name: <alsa_card.pci-0000_00_1b.0> driver: <module-alsa-card.c> owner module: 4 [Code].....
I would like some info regarding an external backup hard drive I use. This carries a lot of text and sound files that I need frequent access to, and I would like to be able to quickly search on that drive using the standard GNOME tracker search facilities. The drive is connected via USB and mounted to /media/hhrutz/Mnemo2.
I have the following questions:
- the database is maintained on my laptop's harddrive in $HOME/.cache/tracker and $HOME/.local/share/tracker/data, correct?- therefore, it would not be a problem for the tracker to update its data if I decided to mount the harddrive in read-only mode?- is it possible to get an overview about the size of the database?- do I have to keep the button "Include removable media" in the "Indexing Preferences" checked?
In other words, is this harddrive understood as a removable media?- if so, can I exempt this drive from "Garbage Collection". That is, I generally do _not_ want to index for example USB thumb drives and such, so I use the default 3-days expiry settings. Does that mean, all the gathered data from my backup harddrive will be gone if I don't connect that drive every two days? Can I prevent that? Because the indexing takes extremely long
I also notice that while the tracker is spinning my harddisk, it doesn't ever seem to advance. It stays at "1%":
> 10 Jun 2015, 18:03:25: 1% File System - Crawling recursively directory 'file:///media/hhrutz/Mnemo2'
I've been working on this off and on for the last couple of days and I can't seem to get this working. I'm using the latest Catalyst Control Center (11.5) and I've also got xorg.conf set up for this resolution. If I switch the driver in xorg.conf to radeon from fglrx, I can get my 1920x1080 resolution (only on GNOME;the login screen and Fluxbox have a black bar on the left that cuts off about a quarter of the screen). When using fglrx and Catalyst Control Center, I can only get a maximum resolution of 1600x1200.
I'm using Mate on Jessie. The problem is that mate-volume-control kinda sucks as an audio control. It doesn't have nearly enough options for a proper volume control program. Pulse is much better for my needs. It or Alsa. Is it possible to remove mate-volume-control, or at least make Pulse the default volume control?
Laptop is Dell Latitude C600/C500 with Pentium III 850Mhz, 256Kb L2 Cache, 256MB RAM, ATI M3 video card, HD 20005 MB and sound card is EES Maestro 3i. After trying to do something with Windows 2000 which was installed on the machine, I decided to put Linux without keeping windows on the machine. First I try with Xubuntu (latest version) which was working but slowly, then I found that Debian could work fine on that machine. I have installed latest version 5.08 and was surprised how goodly old machine can work. I solved problems with screen resolution (change from 800x600 to 1024x768) but I couldn't find solution how to fix problem with sound.
Actually I don't have sound on the machine. I looked for a linux driver for that sound card and Dell is only providing windows drivers. Then I found that I can solve the problem with ALSA drivers but I couldn't find the easy way (or any way at all) to install drivers and to get back the sound. When I click on 'Volume Control' (top right corner of the screen) I get the message: 'Volume control did not find any elements and/or devices to control. This means either that you don't have the right GStreamer plugins installed, or that you don't have a sound card configured.'
I recently got a real fancy unidirectional microphone, but when I go and use it, something strange happens. The mic is a mono mic, but when I record something, it appears to think it's stereo. Instead of having the same thing on both channels, it puts it all in the left channel, and silence on the right channel.
I tried fiddling with alsamixer. In capture (F4), adjusting the "Capture" device has an effect. However, it doesn't do anything useful. Lowering the right channel to zero does nothing, lowering the left channel to zero creates silence, and disabling the right channel creates silence.
In my System>Preferences>Sound (or pavucontrol, or what-have-you), there are "Analog Stereo Input" and "Analog Stereo Duplex" options there, but no "Analog Mono Input" or "Analog Stereo Output + Analog Mono Input" options (the latter being ideal).
Something interesting, though, if I do this: Code: arecord -r 96000 -D pulse -c 1 -vv -V mono /dev/null it works correctly and outputs on both channels. But if I do Code: arecord -r 96000 -D pulse -c 2 -vv -V stereo /dev/null then it's back to the same behavior. The VU meter on the second command shows the left channel going up and down as I make noise, but the right one always at zero.
The machine does have a crap internal mic built in to the screen bezel. If I do either of the above commands, they both work correctly. The stereo VU shows the same activity for both channels.
The machine is a Eee 1015PED, which has Intel integrated sound. Something probably insignificant is that the mic has a 1/4 inch mono plug, and to get it to plug into the Eee, I needed to get a 1/4 female to 1/8 male adapter. The mic's 1/4 plug is mono (duh) and therefore two-conductor, but the adapter I got is stereo, or three conductor (L, R, GND). I don't know if this is tripping something in hardware to tell it it's stereo or something.
I tried the mic on my desktop, which has a SB Audigy 4 (the non-pro flavor) and that has the "Analog Mono Input" function, so that works fine. Is there some way to turn this stereo input into mono input?
I have an Ubuntu 10.10 running on a pc at work. On my Windows pc I can use a free utility called Teamviewer which you run on the pc (no install needed) and then you connect without any need to VPN into my work network.
So, what would be the best way to connect from home and remotely connect to my Ubuntu system at work?
I want to find a way to stream my home movies online, so that I can watch them anywhere. I want it to have a way to see all the movies I am streaming and just click on the one I want to play. It cannot be in flash format because of quality reasons. I'd rather it be able to support xvid or divx if possible because of its compression ratio. If not the movie would have to be no more then 1.4gbs a movie and still have good quality.
The closest thing I got to this was jinzora. I have also tried mediatomb (but I cannot figure out a way for vlc player to open the files without manually entering each link and I also cannot figure out a way for it to know at what point it is in the movie ex: 43:01/1:00:00). I am willing to use other formats if needed, but the size cannot be anymore then 1.4gb and still has to be good quality.
I'm running Ubuntu 10.04 and all was well on my home network until a household member decided to get a laptop and jump on my network. All he does is watch videos on ....., download crap from P2P sites, and maybe even watch p0rn. Is there something I can use to control this or maybe set my router to give him the minimum resources available? Also, I want to block him from downloading junk from P2P sites or places he might get a virus. I'm on a D-Link DGL 4500 Router.
if it's possible to use a white or blacklist to control which folders are ecryptfs encrypted when you're using the "encrypted home folder" option.
Of course I can always create an extra folder outside of my ~ and then symlink what I don't want encrypted into it, but I'd rather that it's possible to create like, ~/.ecryptsfs/excludelist with a list of paths that shouldn't be encrypted.
Installed Ubuntu along with Debian on my Notebook and use Grub Manager to choose between them on startup. Since i like Debian now a lot (in past days it was a very hard system to handle, but there has been some progress i noticed), i have to change some things (want Debian as main system now) For Ubuntu i have: (was meant to be main system on Notebook) "/", "/home" and a "swap" partition, but since i am now going to use mainly Debian, i wanted to store my files all in the "/home"-folder of my extended Ubuntu partition (has much more space available) not in the "/home" folder of the Debian system. So i want both (Debian and Ubuntu) to use the same extended partition ("/home") which i created for Ubuntu to save their files like downloads, videos, and so on.
