Debian :: PulseAudio And ALSA - How These Two Interact
May 8, 2011
Regarding ALSA and PulseAudio - Explanation on how these two interact. After installing Debian I realised that my sound control (Volume Control: HDA Intel ALSA mixer) was different from what I had with Ubuntu where it would display a window called "Sound properties" in which allowed me to control the sound of each program running - I believe this is the PulseAudio aspect. (If I'm wrong at this point please correct me)
Now I have managed to get PulseAudio setup correctly for me (not as easily as Ubuntu but I moved to Debian to learn, not be spoon fed), however the way in which I did it may of been wrong - pretty much just went to synaptic and installed everything with PulseAudio in its name
Currently the sound icon in my top Gnome panel (within the notification area applet) has the ALSA mixer, sometimes when I log on it has the PulseAudio one (Sound preferences window), I don't really mind which one is loaded thanks to the PulseAudio Volume Control program (under Sound & Video). Is there a way though to stick with just one?
I've had nothing but trouble with Pulseaudio in Fedora 14. I had managed to get rid of it in Fedora 10 with the command: su -c "yum remove alsa-plugins-pulseaudio pulseaudio" I just don't want to have to deal with Pulseaudio anymore. It does not like my sound card and gets in the way. Is there a Linux distribution that does not use Pulseaudio ?
I am using a couple of Debian Distro (Sid and Lenny) add some Ubuntu into the mix. I made the switch because I was amazed and satisfied with Debian --> once installed, everything works. For me that's okay for o so many years now. I don't question a lot because it just works and I do my job on it satisfactorily. Namely programming the LAMP style programming. Lately I have been using Debian to communicate over the internet -- using Skype and Pidgin and other such things, not to mention listening to music, watching movies, just using the default applications when I originally install Debian.
Along the way, I need to configure something -- that is desktop related -- like the screen resolution of a new LCD monitor replacing the old one and such. Now about my sound -- I'm not touching it because it is working. But that is not the case always. Now I have a constant error -- it is irritating. Rhythmbox don't make a sound always when I have open a web browser (iceweasel, chrome, epiphany) and a site with multimedia object on it -- like a video or something. So how do I correct this? How do I know, too what I am using -- ALSA or Pulseaudio?
I've recently switched to Debian Squeeze x64 from Kubuntu 10.04 x64. Overall, I like Debian.
I have one small problem: I play Runescape occasionally, which requires Java. On Kubuntu, I'd use Sun Java, however on Debian it just crashes.
So, I decided to use OpenJDK. Now OpenJDK works fine... But I can't get it to work with ALSA audio output. I installed PulseAudio, and that took care of -that- problem.
Now, currently I have both ALSA and PulseAudio installed. For playback, it works great. PulseAudio is a bit laggy, which isn't too noticeable in Runescape, and for things like media, it seems to work OK. For TF2, which I play through Wine however... No. So, I set that to ALSA, and -that- worked right.
Now comes my main problem: I can't get mic input. I'm trying to use Teamspeak 3(proprietary), and while audio output works, I can't get any input.
TS3 lets me use ALSA or Pulse(along with a couple more), but:
1. Selecting PulseAudio lets me select "SB Audigy Analog Mono", the same thing but a "monitor", and "Default Input Device". None of those work, I get "Error: could not open the selected capture device". On top of that, in the PulseAudio control panel, I get zero level on the monitor, making me think its not setup correctly.
2. Selecting ALSA gives me a whole list of options... But they appear to be audio -outputs-, not capture devices. Also, I get the same error as above.
When running "arecord -l", I get:
Of these, I believe the first one was what worked on Kubuntu. Now, of note is that I'm using my "Line in 2" port for capture; On my previous installations I'd simply set its volume with alsamixer and be done with it.
That all being said, I need a solution to one of these three problems:
1. How can I get OpenJDK to work with ALSA, and thereby remove PulseAudio; get everything standardized with ALSA like I had on Kubuntu, OR
2. How can I remove PulseAudio lag, and get the mic working with that, remove ALSA and get everything standardized with PulseAudio, OR
3. How can I simply make my mic work with the current setup?
Any of those will do. I just need to get my mic working.
At one point, I thought I needed pulseaudio for sound, so I messed around with installing it, even though at the time I had ALSA installed. (suffice to say, I know very little about linux sound). Pulseaudio never did work, I removed it with aptitude. But now ALSA seems to reach to pulseaudio for some reason.
Code:
More confusing is that there are no "alsa" looking processes in ps -A. But apparently, the basics are there
Code:
There's only one thing in init.d that seems relevent to alsa:
Code:
But doing this does not help anything. Does anyone know what to do from here?
And because I'm curious, how come I get sound from Flash Player and Audacity with no problem?
I'm having a problem all the sudden with amixer. set Master 5% used to control the pulse audio master volume. Suddenly, it will only raise and lower the headphone volume. Pulseaudio works, but I no longer have a master volume at all.
I have recently acquired a Lenovo Q150 machine and attempting to use it as a HTPC. I've been reading that with this platform a newer kernel is required to make wireless, sound and a few other tweaks work correctly--so I bumped up to testing repositories to upgrade to the 2.6.38 kernel.[URL]...
The audio on this device has been more than a pain. I'm currently using XBMC to play media on this device and after setting the outputs to custom: plughw:1,9 sound is played correctly. I found this out by using alsamixer, selecting the sound card with the F6 key (Nvidia 1) unmutting all outputs, quiting, and running speaker-test -D plughw:1,X where X is the sub-device from the output of aplay -l until sound could be heard from the receiver.
Now my problem is that applications like mplayer, and iceweasel won't output any sound. I'd prefer not to use the optical out on the device and would like to send sound over HDMI. Has anyone had any luck getting it to work as it should?
I've also installed pulseaudio, not too sure if this is really needed. I've also used module assistant before upgrading to compile alsa from source, it worked but i just decided to upgrade the kernel instead of dealing with m-a every time an update comes through. Linux floppy 2.6.38-2-amd64 #1 SMP Thu Apr 7 04:28:07 UTC 2011 x86_64 GNU/Linux
I'm using XFCE with pulseaudio. I don't have a keyboard with dedicated multimedia keys. Getting to alsa to work with f1 f2 and f3 (mute, volume down, volume up) was easy. I want to use pulseaudio instead of alsa. What do I use for mute, volume up and down?
i am having a problem with skype that i wasn't having before, and afaik skype hasn't been upgraded recently, so something else presumably has changed.
because of driver issues i have to use an external usb audio interface to do voip. this interface is not connected to the pulseaudio server. i am able to connect it to jackd and it works fine for both audio in and out. however it no longer shows up in the list of sound devices available to skype. this used not to be the case. i have tried stopping and restarting skype, as well as unplugging and reattaching the interface. the interface does not show up in pulseaudio manager in the lists of devices.
i am using ubuntu 10.04 lts "lucid lynx", and has been encountering problems with audio recently.
i found out for some reason that my system fails to produce sound through pulseaudio, especially when an application is using it (e.g audacious).
the details of the problem:
1. i am using the pulseaudio equalizer from the repository, and i set a program (e.g. audacious) to use pulseaudio so that i can activate the equalizer.
2. while playing, all of my other applications lose the ability to produce any sound, and changing back to alsa during playback (which is using pulseaudio) in audacious indicates that the device is busy. examples include the loss of sound while playing a video from videos.
rough breakdown of what i want to (be able to) do: have sound for all applications using it, for example being able to play a video in videos from my browser and play music in audacious simultaneously.
is there a workaround for this? i'd like to think that there is, but so far my search returned nil.
I'm under Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Hardy Heron using pulseaudio. I've got 2 soundcards : one internal AC97 7.1 without midi (card 0 in ALSA) and a PCI C-MEDIA 2.1 with OPL3 midi (card 3 in ALSA) I have sound in most ALSA or OSS applications with full 7.1 + 2.1 duplex. I have MIDI playback in any ALSA MIDI players (client 29:0 in ALSA).
I'm trying to run Final Doom for W95 on WINE with OSS driver. I have sound effects but no MIDI music. I tryed with padsp and aoss wrappers. I know I can use ALSA driver in wine or timidity, but I would rather use padsp + hardware MIDI if possible. How do I configure ALSA OSS emulation for MIDI playback and check that it's working ? I tryed playmidi but whatever I told it, it couldn't find any midi device.
I just got the upgrade for the Linux Kernel version 2.6.40-4 on my Fedora 15 x86-64 box today, and the installation completed with no problems. However when I rebooted after doing the upgrade, I noticed that I had no sound. I use an ATI Radeon HD 4350 video card, and the opensource ATI driver, and use the HDMI audio from it for sound, since my monitor has a sound output jack on it. I've booted into the previous kernel (2.6.38.8-35), and sound works fine. I've tried with the new kernel in both KDE (my default desktop environment) and XFCE to get sound, and it does not work in either one. I've tried installing the VLC Phonon Backend instead of the GStreamer Backend, reinstalling Pulseaudio, reinstalling Alsa, modprobing the necessary modules needed for the card, checking all configurations with the available Pulseaudio tools (paprefs, pavumeter, pavucontrol), checked the volumes using alsamixer, and reinstalling the ALSA Pulseaudio plugin. After trying all of these, I can still get no sound out of any application, and I also noticed that Flash video plays at 2-3 times it's normal speed after the upgrade. Again, these problems do not occur on my previous kernel. Did I maybe overlook something, or can anyone else think of something I could try?
It was recommended to me that I remove pulseaudio and re-install alsa. All the howtos on reinstalling alsa had instructions for re-installing alsa from the source. Is it possible to re-install alsa from the repos? If so what are the necessary packages that I need to install, for a complete re-install of alsa?
I spent a few days trying to make audio work on my TV connected via HDMI to a PC. The speaker test used by the sound preferences was dead, as was MPlayer. I managed to find a solution for MPlayer, giving the option "-ao alsa:device=hdmi", as specified in this article:So, basically ALSA can see all my devices. This is the output of aplay -l:Quote:
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices **** card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 0: ALC1200 Analog [ALC1200 Analog] Subdevices: 1/1
I have an Intel HDA audio card, and would like to record both my soundcard output and my microphone input at the same time. Getting to record my soundcard output (aka "Stereo Mix" or "What-U-Hear") is impossible for my soundcard without using the PulseAudio monitor, so I've set that up. Now I can record either the PulseAudio monitor for my soundcard, or the microphone input, but I don't know how to record both at the same time.
Currently, my .asoundrc looks like this:
Code:
pcm.pulse { type pulse } ctl.pulse {
[code]....
So now I can choose either "pulse" as an input channel in, for example, Audacity or RecordMyDesktop applications (and then set in the PA volume control the actual channel which I want recorded), or choose "pulse_monitor" or "pulse_mic", in order to record either the PA monitor or the microphone, respectively.
I've read through the ALSA plugins reference, as well as the Asym and Dmix pages on ALSA wiki, but I'm still not sure how to put this together. I figured there should be a way either to route the microphone input into the ALSA output, and thus make the PA monitor "hear" what I speak into the microphone, or to make a completely new channel with both ALSA output and microphone input as "slaves", and then use that for recording.
how different OS interact with each other, or if this is possible at all. e.g. assume i am running only ubuntu on a comp. now i have saved various files such as openoffice, basic text documents, movies etc.so if can i open them straightaway in mac or windows OS ? i mean the filing system are all different, right ? e.g. ext4, ntfs, and whatever mac uses. also if i have lots of data saved on a mac, can i simply transfer this on to an ubuntu or windows OS ?
I have recently been forced to do a hardware upgrade (my previous mobo died). Now, sounds works ok with,amarok because kde has recognized the new hardware and switched to it.
..... does not work, likely because flash uses alsa-oss which is probably not configured automatically. I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling both alsa-oss and flash, but it didn't solve the problem.
I'm using the Java Service Wrapper to create a service in Linux. This Java Application has no main GUI, but if certain error message occur then it displays a warning box allowing the user to know. If I log into root and install the application everything works fine. But, if I log into a none root user graphically and then do a su - to get to root the service will not start. This is the command I'm using inside the service (/etc/init.d/rc.d/backup) to start the application
I'm aware I can do !commands but I'd like to somehow integrate a shell in vim. Or could I use screen and split the screen so that vim takes up say, half of the screen?
When I start firefox the home google page will load and all is well. When I go to any other page (ex. cnn.com, gmail, etc) the page will load graphically, but then continue to load forever. At this point I cannot click on anything in firefox including the drop-down menus.I must force quit at this point.
I updated last night even though I was already using firefox 3.6. I had a problem with flash last time I updated. I reinstalled firefox and went back to firefox 3.5 without any success.This makes me think that the problem is something other than firefox.I am on a Toshiba Satellite L505-S5965 running ubuntu 9.10. I'd give you more information but when I click on system and go down to "About Ubuntu" it loads forever - this is another problem I need to fix. Ugh. I should never have updated
I have been trying to install an electronic medical records package (openemr) using package manager on Ubuntu 10.10. The installation requires that I give answers to certain questions. In 9.10 and 10.04, one could follow the installation and interact, if necessary, by opening a terminal within package manager. This option seems not to be available in 10.10. Have I missed something?
I'm investigating how to copy a file located in my file system into another device. I googled to find a solution for my case but I didn't find anything. My original problem was to find a way to permit my code to move a file into a USB device. I wonder If is there a way to implement the cp command or some mechanism that permits my code to interact with between the file system on my computer and the second one on USB external driver (FAT32) ?
while some linux distros come with samba pre-installed, webmin doesn't automatically set up itself to interact with it, plus i want to know how to get it working with other unix-like operating system other than gnu/linux (solaris, freeBSD, and mac os x)
I installed skype 2.1 beta and pulse audio. Just installed the packages and it worked. Surprisingly. Problem is that Skye now selects pulseaudio for microphone, out and ringer. No problem it actually set it up to my logitech headset which is by default almost right. It set it up to use my logitech microphone and headset speakers for talking, which is great. But I want to switch my ringer from headset speakers to main computer speakers. Anyone know where this can be done. Skype only lets me select pulseaudio (locla server) for all three. Yet somehow it knows to use my logitech headset for talking. But I want to direct my ringing of incoming calls to main speakers. pavucontrol does not let me do this. Anyone has an idea of how to do this? If there is a graphical application that can do this, please let me know.
Used ubuntu for years and loved it. recent bugs in flash and loggin out and others made me try debian for extra stability and security at the risc of loosing myself in the complexity of debian as it's no plug and play here. So far seems to be very similar in use to ubuntu, surprisingly. Running nvidia-xconfig seems to be the only difference. So far I have been able to figure things out to make it work, we will see how I do in the long run. Ubuntu was sure easy.
I have something like the following in my expect script:
Code:
interact { -nobuffer -re {^s } {
[code]....
I have put the "^" anchor to match only those pattern that does not have anything before "s" e.g.
1.when I type "s" followed by "enter" key it should match.
2.if I type something like "chess" followed by "enter" key it shouldn't match. the second case is also being matched by the regular expression I have in my code.
..and the "listeners" with: load-module module-rtp-recv
Then, playing on the sender, and using PulseAudio Volume Control /Playback to set "Null Output", my listeners all start working as expected. The outstanding problem is that the sender is silent - nothing from its speakers. Perhaps not surprising after the "Null" setting above.
Is it possible to stream like this and also listen on the sender at the same time -
