[CentOS] sound problems... alsa & systemd? Partially FIXED

Mon Apr 3 23:47:16 UTC 2017
Fred Smith <fredex at fcshome.stoneham.ma.us>

On Mon, Apr 03, 2017 at 12:53:54PM -0400, ken wrote:
> On 04/02/2017 01:31 PM, Kay Schenk wrote:
> >
> >
> >On 03/29/2017 06:43 AM, ken wrote:
> >>On 03/28/2017 08:53 PM, ken wrote:
> >>>The www has failed me with this, so I'm trying you guys.  Sound worked
> >>>great out of the box when I installed 7.2... Yay!  I could watch all
> >>>kinds of videos, like on facebook and youtube.  And I could listen to
> >>>most podcasts too.  But then something happened. It was either a
> >>>kernel upgrade or that I installed vlc (for watching videos on DVD)
> >>>and the whole stack of codecs for it... I don't know exactly when, but
> >>>at some point I no longer had sound with youtube  and other web
> >>>videos.  The videos played fine, just no sound.  Note that using vlc,
> >>>both video and the audio with it play just fine.  I need to select the
> >>>audio driver (from a list in a vlc menu), however, else the sound
> >>>won't work in vlc either.
> >>>
> >>>If I go into the Applications menu, then System Tools -> Settings ->
> >>>Sound, under "Choose a device for sound output:" there are no devices
> >>>listed.  There used to be.
> >>>
> >>>If I run "aplayer file.wav", nothing plays (no sound at all) and I get
> >>>the error "main:786: audio open error: No such file or directory".
> >>>If, on the other hand, I run "aplay file.wav -D plughw:0" (i.e.,
> >>>specify the/a device), I do get sound, the file does play.
> >>>
> >>>I ran alsa-info.sh and it posted tons of info from it on my setup at
> >>>http://www.alsa-project.org/db/?f=1dba91886be054df4816000768a0f5b109947a48.
> >>>
> >>>Yet it still doesn't tell me what's missing.
> >>>
> >>>Anyone here have an idea...? or thoughts about where to look next?
> >>>
> >>>tia,
> >>>ken
> >>
> >>Still poking around my system for a solution, I found this comment at
> >>the top of /usr/lib/systemd/system/alsa-state.service and two other
> >>files in the same directory:
> >>
> >>># Note that two different ALSA card state management schemes exist and
> >>>they
> >>># can be switched using a file exist check -
> >>>/etc/alsa/state-daemon.conf .
> >>
> >>The /etc/alsa/state-daemon.conf file consists of one line:
> >>
> >>># Remove this file to disable the alsactl daemon mode
> >>
> >>I understand that a daemon continually runs, waiting for an event and
> >>then acts in some way in response, but it has to mean something more in
> >>this context.  Anyone familiar with the internals of this?
> >>
> >>
> >I am not on systemd right now. I'm on CentOS 6.8. However, on an
> >openSUSE version I was. Sound problems were the bane of my
> >existence forever it seemed. So it maye take you a while to
> >troubleshoot this. Using JUST alsa you should be able to play
> >sound files at the command line. See:
> >http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Main_Page
> >
> >
> >I think I may have installed pulse-audio to get things working
> >under systemd with my GUI. What is your GUI? This may be a factor.
> >
> Thanks for the thought.  This is quite plausible.  I did a little
> reading at the site you suggested and then at another which was
> linked off of that.  I didn't find anything helpful at either place
> yet... well, except that in the audio stack alsa is just one layer;
> jack and pulseaudio ride on top of it.  Apparently sound on linux
> can use all of them-- and others on both of the same layers-- all at
> the same time.  This is probably what makes the configuration of
> them all so challenging.
> 
> In the middle of reading those sites I decided to see if audacity (a
> quite sophisticated and solid program) could somehow handle sound. I
> installed it and fired it up.  Out of the box it didn't work.  But I
> simply had to choose the correct device from audacity's drop-down
> menu and, viola, it would produce sound from a loaded file.  Cool.
> 
> Right after that, I tried running "aplay
> /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front_Right.wav" and that worked.  Previously
> it didn't, although (as noted above)  that same command when
> specifying the device did (i.e., "aplay
> /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front_Right.wav -D plughw:0").  So apparently
> installing and/or running audacity fixed something, but not
> everything.
> 
> Another trippy discovery:  I used rpm to verify all the files
> installed with all the alsa* packages and there were absolutely no
> changes to any of them... they're all exactly as they were when
> first installed.  Since sound worked exquisitely when I first
> installed 7.2 on this box and no alsa files have been changed since
> then, it's hard to find the fault with alsa.
> 
> Although aplay is back to working without having to specify the
> device, I still don't get sound out of youtube videos (even though I
> checked the settings and restarted Firefox), and gnome3's System
> Settings -> Sound still lists no devices at all.  These are two
> major failures.

Are you, perchance, using Firefox-52? At version 52, they switched
Firefox to use Pulse instead of Alsa. So you'll probably need to
fire up pavucontrol and mess with its sliders to get firefox audio
working.

I'm on Centos-7.3, and when I switched from 7.2 I found that some
things now are controlled by pavucontrol, and not by the volume
control in the top panel (I'm using Mate, not Gnome,... Gah, how can
anyone stand Gnome 3.x??) It's kind of a pain, I haven't yet found
a way to localize controls for all the various audio-producing tools
in one place. Does anyone know how to do that?

> 
> Does anyone know how to restart audio in systemd?  That might still
> be worth looking into.
> 
> Before doing audacity, I tried gnome's mplayer.  Geez, is that a
> stinky pile of code.  Just selecting a directory where a file could
> be selected ended up locking up the app; I had to do a kill to get
> it off my screen.  Does that actually work for anyone?  If so, what
> kind of files or net locations does it work for?
> 
> Thanks once more for your thoughtful suggestions.
> 
> 
> 
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