How To -- Fix silent notification sounds

[SteveRiley]

After an update today, all system notification sounds quit working. Audio from applications and web sites worked, just the system sounds were silent. Even weirder, in System Settings | Application and System Notifications | Manage Notifications, events that had sounds still listed the sound files -- even though they didn't play.

After some investigation, I discovered that all the paths to the sound files were missing. There are two ways to fix this: hand-edit each and every entry in the GUI, or come up with a quick command line alternative. I determined the command-line was the way to go. Here it is:

for j in /usr/share/kde4/apps/*/*.notifyrc; do sudo sed -i 's_Sound=_Sound=file:///usr/share/sounds/_g' $j; done

Sounds are defined system-wide in /usr/share/kde4/apps/*/*.notifyrc files. Whenever you alter a setting, KDE makes a copy of that app's .notifyrc file and stores it in your profile. Because the system files lack the missing paths, I figured it was better to fix those, which is what the above command will do.

[woodsmoke]

Re: How To -- Fix silent notification sounds

lol didn't help in my precise install! lol
woodsmoke

[SteveRiley]

Re: How To -- Fix silent notification sounds

lol didn't help in my precise install! lol

OK...I was just reading your observation thread, saw your complaint about the missing sounds, and was going to point you to this post, but you're already here!

First, make sure you don't have any .notifyrc files anywhere in your home folder hierarchy. Next, take a look at, for example, /usr/share/kde4/apps/kde/kde.notifyrc and find a line that starts with Sound= -- if the command ran correctly, you should see, for example:

[Event/Trash: emptied]
...name and comment stuff cut...
Action=Sound
Sound=file:///usr/share/sounds/KDE-Sys-Trash-Emptied.ogg

[Snowhog]

Re: How To -- Fix silent notification sounds

for j in /usr/share/kde4/apps/*/*.notifyrc; do sudo sed -i 's_Sound=_Sound=file:///usr/share/sounds/_g' $j; done

Thank you for this. I had, in the back of my mind, noticed that event sounds were missing, but didn't think to much about it. Executed your 'fix' and my Trash now plays it's sound when emptied. I'm sure that all the other event sounds are going to work again as well.

[SteveRiley]

Re: How To -- Fix silent notification sounds

Yes, quiet trash is so annoying

[Snowhog]

Re: How To -- Fix silent notification sounds

Out of curiosity, why didn't the dev's just include the /usr/share/sounds into the system-wide path environment?

[SteveRiley]

Re: How To -- Fix silent notification sounds

As Kubicle mentioned in the Qt 4.8 thread, this is a known bug. Some distros are already implementing workarounds.

[Snowhog]

Re: How To -- Fix silent notification sounds

Because one can accomplish things in Linux in "more than one way", I decided to use my original kde.notifyrc (I made a backup before executing Steve's command. What, you did not!?) and instead, modified the system-wide environment 'path'.

cd /etc/
sudo cp environment environmentORIGINAL
sudo nano environment

I edited the PATH= line and inserted /usr/share/sounds between /bin: and /usr/games so it now reads:

PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/share/sounds:/usr/games"

Saved and rebooted. Put something into Trash and emptied Trash. Sound plays. Life is Good. Linux is Good. 8)

Of course, I understand that either 'fix' - Steve's or mine - will not last any update that includes replacements for either modified file (unless the update is smart enough to notice that the installed file is different than the updates file and asks what you want to do). But, at least, unless this issue is really fixed, I'll know what to do.

[woodsmoke]

Re: How To -- Fix silent notification sounds

it worked later.

don't know why later but it did work.

woodsmoke

[Snowhog]

Re: How To -- Fix silent notification sounds

IF you used my method, then a restart/reboot is required. If you used Steve's method, it is immediate -- with a log out/log in of KDE. At least, that was required after applying SR's fix in my shiny new 12.04!


Underlined comment added 2012-03-03.

[GreyGeek]

I had that problem too, and like Snowhog, just ignored it because its a frill.

However, unlike Snowhog's setup, my environment file already had the setting he added to it. And, SR's script, while fixing the problem in *.notifyrc, did not restore the sound. It may after I reboot.

[geoaraujo]

Thank you SteveRiley!