phonon audio problems

[Guest]

Hi all,

I installed Kubuntu 10.04 and have run into a few issues so far. The biggest is sound. The sound works, but only one sound can be played at once. For example. If i play a song in Amarok all goes well, except for when a second sound (such as a system notification, flash, vlc, etc) wants to play. If this happens one of two things happen: the sound on amarok cuts out and the new sound plays, or amarok keeps playing and the new sound does not. When amarok cuts out, it does not resume playback again, although the track keeps running. In the KDE sound settings, i have tried all three sound card options (i only have one card). Also, pressing the test button while a sound is playing returns a "device does not exist" error. When a sound is not playing the test works fine any device (i use the digital out). Amarok is just and example.

I also had this problem on previous versions of KDE. I did manage to fix the problem by installing pulseaudio. This is not a flawless fix though, as the KDE volume controls do not work and some programs have to be configured for sound manually.

Is there a way to get this working with phonon?


nick@nick-comp:~$ aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: SB [HDA ATI SB], device 0: VT1708S Analog [VT1708S Analog]
Subdevices: 1/2
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
Subdevice #1: subdevice #1
card 0: SB [HDA ATI SB], device 1: VT1708S Digital [VT1708S Digital]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0



Thanks all!

[Guest]

Re: phonon audio problems

I am experiencing the exact same problem. Sound seems to play fine so long as one sound is playing. Actually, it appears that it actually that only one application may use sound resources at once. Whether it is currently actually playing a sound doesn't seem to matter.

So far as I know, the problem has nothing to do with what sound card you use, so long as it works at all.

[skunk]

Re: phonon audio problems

So far as I know, the problem has nothing to do with what sound card you use, so long as it works at all.

If your sound card supports hardware duplexing then multiple sources will be able to play simultaneously using alsa. If it does not then you have to either install a mixer in alsa or install pulseaudio or one of the other sound servers.

[dibl]

Re: phonon audio problems

In addition to pulseaudio, you probably should install:

padevchooser
pavucontrol
paman

Review the settings in paman and padevchooser, and see that they make sense for your setup.

In pavucontrol, look closely at the tiny mute icon for each output device. Click them to mute and again to unmute. Mute the one(s) you don't want to use (i.e. mute headphones if you only want speaker output). In mine, only "Analog Speaker" is not muted, until I plug in headphones. My hardware:

00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family High Definition Audio Controller (rev 01)

is configured as "Analog Surround 5.1 Output + Analog Stereo Input".

In pulseaudio manager (paman), under the "clients" tab, you should see Kmix KDE4 listed, as well as ConsoleKit Session and paman. If you have pavucontrol running, then it should also be listed.

Check the KMix mixer, PCM channel, and make sure it didn't get muted at some point.

Hope this helps.