Screwed up sound in KDE 4.2

[Lucky75]

Hi all,

It seems that I have royally screwed up my sound. I have tried both pulse and alsa, but both seem to be destroyed now. I think I've mixed and matched too many tutorials because none of them seemed to work.

Originally after upgrading to 8.10 and KDE 4.2, everything worked fine. Then yesterday I wanted to try getting my surround sound (5.1) working again.... I seem to be able to get a few things working at a time. At first after screwing things up, I was able to get sound on mplayer, and no sound in amarok unless I chose oss. Now I can get sound in amarok, but no sound from flash players such as youtube, and no sound in mplayer. Surround sound never worked.


Also, I see a bunch of tutorials (I assume for GNOME) saying to make sure things are set in System->Preferences->Sound dialog. How can I find something like this in KDE 4.2? The one I find under multimedia in System settings seems rather useless. I do remember finding a dialog for choosing between alsa/pulse, and then stereo, 5.1, 7.1, etc in an older version of KDE, but now I can't find anything of the sort.


Can someone PLEASE help me get sound working again properly? Preferably with surround sound 5.1? My card name shows as NVidia, which I find odd in itself.

Thanks!


Edit: Here are the results of aplay -l btw:

**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 0: AD198x Analog [AD198x Analog]
Subdevices: 0/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 1: AD198x Digital [AD198x Digital]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0


And:

00:10.1 Audio device: nVidia Corporation MCP51 High Definition Audio (rev a2)
Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 818f
Flags: bus master, 66MHz, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 23
Memory at d8000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
Capabilities: <access denied>
Kernel driver in use: HDA Intel
Kernel modules: snd-hda-intel

[PhilT]

Re: Screwed up sound in KDE 4.2

I think I had a similar problem with a new machine purchased recently. You seem to have the High Definition Audio capability with this card. Try re-installing KMix. When you see the sound icon on the taskbar click on it and check the Settings>Configure Channels. If you look you will see all the possible channels available. Some may be turned off or muted by default. Also make sure the HDA ATI HDMI section is not muted.

The various setting in the Configure Channels are somewhat confusing - play around with Amarok going; you can change the channel that responds to the KMix volume control on the taskbar. I had a bit of trouble getting the right settings going.

Hope this helps.

Good luck!

[Lucky75]

Re: Screwed up sound in KDE 4.2

Thanks for the reply! I actually added "options snd-hda-intel model=3stack" to my alsa-base file, and then did a killall pulseaudio, alsa force-restart and it seems to be working off and on.

At first I would try playing mplayer after that and it would be surround sound (after I unmuted the stuff with the new channels in kmix), and then I would try playing something from youtube or amarok and it wouldn't work, and then my mplayer video wouldn't work anymore, so I had to force-restart again.

This happened a few times, and now it seems to be steady for all 3, although amarok still won't work for alsa (but autodectect works, so I assume it's the oss?).

I haven't tried restarting my computer yet to see if it sticks, because I'm rather scared about what will happen


Not too sure as to why it likes to conk out every now and again though. Any ideas?

[Lucky75]

Re: Screwed up sound in KDE 4.2

I restarted my computer, and I have to do an alsa force-reload almost 4x before I get it to work.

It also seems that I need the programs open before I do the force-reload.

So if I open mplayer, youtube in firefox and amarok, for example, and THEN force-reload that it works, but if I just do a force-reload it does not.

Any suggestions? It would be rather annoying to have to do this every time I restart my pc, and I can't really put it in a startup script because I can't really reproduce it in the same number of force-reloads...

[Lucky75]

Re: Screwed up sound in KDE 4.2

I also STILL can't find any sort of "System->Preferences->sound" for KDE like there is for gnome.

[heinkel_111]

Re: Screwed up sound in KDE 4.2

You did check out the system settings > multimedia?

In other languages this is called "sound"....strange translation...

[Lucky75]

Re: Screwed up sound in KDE 4.2

Yeah, but there isn't anything near the options they have in Gnome with the changing devices to alsa and whatnot. Multimedia just allows me to change from analog -> digital and whatnot.

[Lucky75]

Re: Screwed up sound in KDE 4.2

Interestingly enough, I booted into gnome and set System->Preferences->Sound to use alsa, and I have no problems at all.

Booting back into KDE still causes problems. Why would this be?

[sugarland2k]

Re: Screwed up sound in KDE 4.2

Running KDE 4.2 in Kubuntu 9.04 on my Dell Mini 9, my sound was down also. I went to the kmix sound button, went to settings and clicked on speaker and turned its volume up - fixed !!!

Good luck.

[santana]

Re: Screwed up sound in KDE 4.2

I am having sound issues with KDE 4 on this system. Volume is low , and yes I have it maxed out in KMIX. Alsa, and OSS don't work, but pulse does, albeit at an unreasonably low level.