[CentOS] sound problems... config?

Wed Mar 29 06:23:30 UTC 2017
Barry Brimer <lists at brimer.org>

On Tue, 28 Mar 2017, Alice Wonder wrote:

> On 03/28/2017 05:53 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
>
> I have similar issue with USB headphones. Worked fine in 7.2 but in 7.3 I 
> frequently have to unplug and plug them back in before it finally is able to 
> be selected from the menus as my output.

I notice that you have an HDA-Intel. I do as well. By any chance is the 
last kernel that worked reliably with sound is 
kernel-3.10.0-229.20.1.el7.x86_64. I find that with kernels newer than 
kernel-3.10.0-229.20.1.el7.x86_64 the sound card works, but 
the internal speaker is disabled, but I can plug in headphones and get 
sound that way. If I boot into kernel-3.10.0-229.20.1.el7.x86_64 with no 
other modifications to my system, my sound works fine.

Barry