Ubuntu :: Sound Does Not Work - Completely Disfunctional - Distorted
Jul 27, 2011
I've had sound problems for a very long time with Ubuntu. It once worked fine. Then it got distorted, but I used headfones so that solved that. But now it seems its completely disfunctional. The sound doesn't work at all.
I am not able to get any sound recorded through my mic using my XFi card. It records the sound my computer makes, thought. In other words, if I play a song, it'll play through the capture channel making people on voip application hear it. For some reason. But I am not able to get any sound through the mic.
I have tried to mute and unmute every channel in alsamixer, and tried to change the soundcard profile as well in gnome sound preferences. No luck.
If I use my NVidia built-in sound card however, I am able to talk. But after a random period of time, the sound through my headphones begin to distort, badly, while the voice from my mic comes through clear. People can hear me clearly, but I can't hear them at all because of the distortion. It sound really, really bad.
At first I thought it was a bug with skype, but it happens in other voip clients such as gTalk.
I did a clean install to 10.04. Not too many issues except any sound I play sounds like it's underwater and pops while playing. I have tried to do the Pulse Audio install, but every time I loaded pauvcontrol (I think was the title), it would pop up "Connection Failure: Connection Refused." I tried to follow other guides, but they'd all fail because I'd be missing half of the files it changed. I have a Creative Labs X-Fi Fatality card that has given me troubles in the past, but usually, it works. I tried to install Creative's open driver, but again, I had an error when I attempted to Make the directory.
Have been using the exact same hardware setup for a while now (last 5 or 6 releases) and since 11.04, occasionally my sound will go really strange and fuzzy / distorted. It usually happens when I change music tracks I am listening to, but it will then effect all system noises. It will then go away as suddenly as it happened, again if I pause the track a few times to stop the distortion.
So I recently installed Ubuntu 9.10 on my second hard drive. I also just got a new pair of speakers. When I plugged in these speakers, they sounded pretty crappy ie: bad bass, distortion, etc. At first I figured it was because I bought cheap speakers and I was going to send them back. But instead, I booted up windows and voila... The sound was much better.
So I'm trying to figure out whats up (mind you I'm pretty new to Ubuntu) I looked up my sound card: nVidia AC97 and Ubuntu recognizes and apparently has drivers for this. I also followed the sound problems guide posted in this forum. Got as far as the "ALSA driver Compilation" step without much luck. It installed some stuff, but didn't follow what that guide said it would do.
I am running Karmic (9.10) on an MSI U120 Wind. I dislike netbook-remix but that is beside the point.
Last night I made the biggest mistake of my life which is causing a loss of still counting hours. I decided to do an update, due to having enough bandwidth, and security updates to download.
So it finished, and I went to sleep.
This morning I went to plug in my speakers to the audio jack so I can listen to music loud, and it was all distorted. I changed al 8 or 9 volume controls and nothing. I unplugged the wire from the audio jack, and the sound is perfect on my netbook's speakers.
I have tried different wires, speakers, editing config files, removing and purging related packages, and nothing works...
I have been google-ing for hours and everyone seems to have the same problem, but all of the supposed fixes do not work for me...
Any sound playing through pulseaudio is distorted for the first half-second or so. Sounds like a buzzing or crackling or something. This happens, for example, in Pidgin and Clementine (music player). If I set these programs to output through alsa instead of pulseaudio, there's no such problem. Also no such problem existed in 10.04. And I tried the fix in the sticky, nothing changed. Probably less than a half second of distortion, really. Maybe 100ms.
I've been working at this issue myself for two days and still haven't come up with anything. On the default system config with Pulseaudio, Skype 2.1 has absolutely no sound, worse, if I call, or somebody calls me, the program becomes unresponsive and I end up having to either reboot or log out and in again. The only option Skype gives me in the sound settings for anything is PulseAudio Server (local) which, (obviously) is incorrect.So after a few hours of trying to sort it out with pulse, I found a workaround involving the REPLACEMENT of Pulse with esound following these commands in a terminal:
This works to an EXTENT. I have output sound, Skype makes all it's little beeps and blips and what-have-you, I can hear the other person clear as day,and I'm able to select different sound card settings now. But when I talk to someone or call echo123, my voice comes through choppy, garbled and extremely distorted.Words are run together at a super fast pace, and sometimes even quickly repeat.So then I tried yet another supposed workaround, this involving modifying .asoundrc as seen here:
Quote: #asym fun start here. we define one pcm device called "dmixed" pcm.dmixed { ipc_key 1025 type dmix[code]...
After applying this, I not only changed my settings to asymed, but ALL the new settings it gave me. This time my words are run together AND I sound like some kind of deep voiced monster.Now, once and for all, to save me another two days of searching through google and topics with unanswered pleas for help, can somebody tell me what is going on here and how the hell do I fix it? T_T.I'm running Skype 2.1, (latest build) on Xubuntu 10.10 with a C-Media CMI8738 sound card. Sound works on all other applications and the microphone is solid, since I just switched from Windows and it worked before now.
P.S. just to avoid people thinking I'm stupid and asking this, yes I am positive that none of the sound settings are on mute. XD
New build to F12. Sound was fine in F11. Now, massive distortion. I have tried every possible permutation of settings. With the main volume control in the top taskbar, there are two positions of level setting where the audio drops to a normal level and sounds OK but any application changing the level or starting to use the Pulseaudio changes the level and its loud and massively distorted again.
In the Pulseaudio manager->sink->alsaoutput.pci-0000-00-11.5.analog-stereo -> properties-> show volume meter, the audio is always maxed out in level. I have tried everything, its unworkable right now. Its possible to start alsamixer from terminal and adjust settings for good audio but any future change reverts to distortion. All changes in Pulseaudio Dev mgr or vol control etc change the audio as they should but do not affect the problem.
i am using ubuntu10.04 , the sound is distorted booth on playing cds or listening to radio online . it sounds like a record where the speed keeps changing
It is well known that mencoder can be used to encode video to be burned on DVD with a tool like dvdauthor. The whole procedure is described here: 7.8. Using MEncoder to create VCD/SVCD/DVD-compliant files
Sound for a DVD is normally encoded with AC3. I encountered some cases where the encoded sound was badly distorted. As it seems, the default for the input changed to float at some point. The fix for this is to use: Code: acodec=ac3_fixed instead of "acodec=ac3".
I have a core i7 machine on which I have dual booted Ubuntu 10.10 and Fedora 14. I am facing a weird problem on both the Linux distributions. Currently, I am facing three major problems which are causing me to use my laptop instead of this machine.Most of the times the sound gets distorted ( like the tempo is very slow and some cracks), but some other times it just works fine. ( I experienced this on both Ubuntu and Fedora)Internet at times is very fast and works great, but suddenly it slows down and takes a whole lot time to load. sometimes it just never gets fast.The low resolution flash videos, gets this very weird high pitch sound
Also, I noticed ( I don't think there is a relation between the two or is there?) that whenever the internet is slow, the sound is also distorted and when internet is fast sound works great.The intermittent nature of the problem is making it difficult to debug.
I have distorted sound when viewing SWF files on browsers. Tried both chrome and iceweasel. I have a Dell XPS with debian testing (64 bit), alsa is 1.0.23. Sound is working properly when playing formats other than swf.
I play a flash video, and then play music natively the sound doesn't work. Or I can play flash and have sound but not play music with sound that's on my PC. Or I play my music on my PC, say one song, and the other is high pitched distorted, and rings. I have to exit the program and start it again for it to play nice. How do I resolve this most irritating bug?
I recently bought a monthful of Spotify Premium to enjoy music at the school with my laptop and Nokia E71 with the offline mode - the WiFi at our school is too laggy to stream online music. Under wine, it works quite fine, however, I would totally like to use the native client (yes, I'm too a "yay linux" person like all of you here ), but the music quality is very poor on offline mode. It clips, goes forward, a second back, then back forward etc. The bitrate sounds to be high, an the quality is very good except the annoying clipping.
Anyone else experiencing this? I'm using Ubuntu 10.10 Beta release with Samsung N510 so the cpu power should not be an issue even though the native client uses the resources very greedily. Interesting enough, on my desktop computer (Core2Quad @ 3,3GHz, 4GB 900MHz DDR2 RAM) with the same OS version and software plays offline playlists smoothly (only some occasional clipping)
I'm trying to use text2wave. I have a .festivalrc file and a voice selected. It works when I play a text file. When I make a text2wave file and play it back with aplay it sounds distorted. I used this command
I've tried KDE, XFCE & fluxbox (this latter of which I think I prefer). They all work but they all have similar streaks & distortions on the GUI. Is this certainly a driver issue?
Also, after using them for a while they freeze.
In an earlier thread dc_eros suggested installing the latest openchrome, which fixed a similar problem he had with his first slack13.
Few days ago the sound from my lenovo x61 started messing up so I did few googling and came up with solution to replace my pulseaudio with oss. Well, I following the instruction and now my sound stopped working altogether.
Quote:
aplay -l **** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices **** aplay: device_list:256: snd_ctl_pcm_next_device
I was just using the mic and watched it stop working suddenly. I was in the middle of a skype test call when the graphical mixer level died down to zero in the middle of the call. When the test call was played back, the first part sounded fine then the sound got lower until it became inaudible. Since then I can't get any sound from my mic in skype.
Also, the audio input level graphically shown in Sound Preferences shows no fluctuations in sound as it used to before. The input device is enabled. I tried using Sound Recorder to record some sound clips and that worked fine. So the mic is working but Sound Preferences and Skype seem to have the mic level really low. I'm not sure what else to think considering it was working perfectly a few minutes ago. I've tried restarting, but that didn't fix it either.
How can I disable login sounds in maverick without completely disabling the ubuntu sound theme?I just want it to not make sounds on startuplogin but still make the ubuntu sounds when new mail is received, etc.
I for some reason can't get Cyrus-sasl to work completely. I have to manually start it via saslauthd -a show if I let it start up itself or do a service saslauthd start or restart testsaslauthd will fail. I need help getting this fixed. I tried setting /etc/sysconfig/saslauthd to shadow instead of Pam but still no luck. Also when I try to login my postfix server I get an error stating that my username or password is incorrect even though it is right and I can receive mail from dovecot.
I upgraded to fedora 13 from fedora 11. i used the preupgrade method. i am running dual boot with win7 as 2nd OS after downloading all packages, the preupgrade asked to reboot. after bootloader started, the screen haults and displays "FINDING STORAGE DEVICES" and doesnot go any further. I hae tried both options of enabling and disabling sata option, but it didn't worked.
Recently I have started using my netbook (Acer Aspire one D250) alot more due to travelling and I noticed that the mic didn't work. Headed to the Ubuntu forums and saw a thread about installing ALSA. So I did and now I have no sound. From what I can tell ubuntu is no longer picking up my sound devices but I'm sure. Hence why I am here. I need to get my sound working again (obviously) and then in turn get my mic working for mumble and other VOIP programs.
I am using a USB headset and a logitech QuickCam Pro 4000 with Ubuntu 10.04
1. When I change the sound to internal sound the webcam works in Skype but I have not sound. 2. When I change the sound to the USB headset (sound output) the webcam does not work in Skype.
In ubuntu 10.04 my X-fi Fatal1ty Titanium sound card worked for my speakers but I had to use onboard sound for the mic. When I installed 10.10 the sound card no longer works at all so I have to run the speakers through the onboard sound.
The second problem I have is that Skype will not pick up my microphone all other programs seem to be able to record from the microphone just fine but skype does not. Ive tried selecting all the different input device options from the skype settings but none of them seem to work.
EDIT: Sound doesn't work at all in wine.
EDIT2: The X-fi card no longer shows up in the sound control panel.
trying to get everything set up in Debian lenny on my new Toshiba staellite L500. I have successfully installed the wireless drivers and graphics card and have them both up and running. But I'm having trouble with the sound card. Specifically, it appears to be installed but I cant get any sound or any devices related to sound (speakers, volume control, alsamixer) to work at all.
When I installed my 64 bit system of Ubuntu 10.04 the sound worked very well and I were very happy. The problem started however when I installed Skype which uses pulseaudio. As soon as I start skype (or any other application that uses pulse, HoN for example) the applications sound output or input does not work at all. If I have pulseaudio started in some way, applications that I suppose do not use it like spotify or flash player stops to produce sounds. And when I type "pulseaudio" in the terminal it gives me this:
When my laptop (Asus X83VM) first boots up and Lucid (10.04) loads, my top panel on the right hand side where the power button, date, user name, volume control, mail icon, battery level, etc, is all 'garbly-gook.' By 'garbly-gook' I mean icons are over-lapping and missing. If I move the panel to a different location (right or left, but not bottom), the panel seems to reset and is no longer garbly-gook.