Sound - is it just me or is it really such a black art?
I never seem to be able to get sound apps working quickly/easily in Linux (or WIndows for that matter). Is it really such a black art. For example I'm trying to get twinkle (VOIP softphone) to work in Ubuntu 10.04. Installs OK, configures OK with my VOIP provider, works perfectly as far as making the call is concerned. I can dial a number, the number rings and I get all the confirmations when the far end picks up the phone and hangs up. .... but there's no sound, which is rather fundamental for a phone application! And there's no way to diagnose it at all, no simple tests to play a sound, nothing, nada. How is one meant to configure and test sound setup on Linux (Ubuntu 10.04 in this case) with no simple tests to try out. Sound does appear to work as my Virtualbox Windows XP guest plays Windows sounds fine. However I can't find *any* Linux application which will play a test sound for me. Twinkle offers me a whole raft of different sound 'devices':- ALSA: default device ALSA: plughw:0,0: HDA Intel (ALC1200 Analog) ALSA: plughw:0,1: HDA Intel (ALC1200 Digital) ALSA: Other device OSS: /dev/dsp: Realtek ALC1200 (HDA-Intel) OSS: other device So which do I choose (I think I've tried most of them!)? -- Chris Green
On 28/06/10 21:22, Chris G wrote:
I never seem to be able to get sound apps working quickly/easily in Linux (or WIndows for that matter). Is it really such a black art.
.... but there's no sound, which is rather fundamental for a phone application! And there's no way to diagnose it at all, no simple tests to play a sound, nothing, nada. How is one meant to configure and test sound setup on Linux (Ubuntu 10.04 in this case) with no simple tests to try out.
Have you tried: System -> Administration -> System Testing. It has sound tests. -- nev
On 28/06/10 23:18, nev young wrote:
On 28/06/10 21:22, Chris G wrote:
I never seem to be able to get sound apps working quickly/easily in Linux (or WIndows for that matter). Is it really such a black art.
.... but there's no sound, which is rather fundamental for a phone application! And there's no way to diagnose it at all, no simple tests to play a sound, nothing, nada. How is one meant to configure and test sound setup on Linux (Ubuntu 10.04 in this case) with no simple tests to try out.
Have you tried: System -> Administration -> System Testing. It has sound tests.
Also for testing input you can use the System, Preferences, Sound control panel as that has a simple bargraph that indicates input levels. One issue you might be having is that looking at that list of available sound devices there is no provision for the Pulseaudio sound sync and source which is what most of the default appliactions are using now. Pulse is there to provide transparent and concurrent access to the sound devices (in reality it mostly seems to cause more problems than it solves) But the issue remains that sometimes if you attach to the ALSA devices directly it will steal the sound away from Pulse or vice versa. Before you try again make sure that again in the Sound preferences window under applications there are no applications currently using the sound devices or you may find they are unavailable to anything else not using Pulse. Also the volume applet on the taskbar is simplistic so you might want to fire up Pulse Audio Volume control which should be in Applications, Sound and Video. Then there is alsamixer which will adjust the raw levels Pulse isn't aware of. Put simply it is a bit of a mess with a multitude of subsystems some of which may not be relevant to your application....have fun
On Mon, 2010-06-28 at 21:22 +0100, Chris G wrote:
..... but there's no sound, which is rather fundamental for a phone application! And there's no way to diagnose it at all, no simple tests to play a sound, nothing, nada. How is one meant to configure and test sound setup on Linux (Ubuntu 10.04 in this case) with no simple tests to try out.
I've found that simple setups just seem to work but configuring ALSA for something more complicated is just that - complicated. One of the issues has always been sound card sharing. It seems the default under Linux has always been not to share sound devices so if two application try to open the same output device and play a sound the second one either fails or blocks until the first one finished. I am running Ubuntu 10.04 too and as initially configured it uses PulseAudio. This means the pulseaudio daemon will open the ALSA playback device and other applications will normally send their output to PulseAudio which will then mix everything together and send in on to ALSA to be played on the sound card. I don't know twinke so I don't know if it has the option to output to PulseAudio. If so that is probably the easiest answer. If not you could try the mechanism whereby ALSA presents what appears to be a device but actually sends the output to pulse audio. For me if I run aplay -L the first few entries returned are: null Discard all samples (playback) or generate zero samples (capture) pulse Playback/recording through the PulseAudio sound server front:CARD=NVidia,DEV=0 HDA NVidia, VT1708B Analog Front speakers So it would be trying 'pulse' as an ALSA destination name in the twinkle config. You could also run a test to see if paplay can play a simple WAV file. Steve.
At Mon, 28 Jun 2010 21:22:57 +0100, Chris G wrote:
.... but there's no sound, which is rather fundamental for a phone application! And there's no way to diagnose it at all, no simple tests to play a sound, nothing, nada. How is one meant to configure and test sound setup on Linux (Ubuntu 10.04 in this case) with no simple tests to try out.
What about: $ aplay /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front_Center.wav and $ arecord > test.wav And then when things don't work, fiddle with $ alsamixer If you use PulseAudio (which I understand Ubuntu does) things could be very different. -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Richard Lewis ISMS, Computing Goldsmiths, University of London Tel: +44 (0)20 7078 5134 Skype: richardjlewis JID: ironchicken@jabber.earth.li http://www.richardlewis.me.uk/ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- +----------------------------------------------+ | Support open access to scholarship | | http://freeculture.org/ http://www.doaj.org/ | +----------------------------------------------+
participants (5)
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Chris G -
nev young -
Richard Lewis -
Steve Fosdick -
Wayne Stallwood