No sound from Chrome

[root]

Ever since I switched from 14.2 to 15.0 I have not had sound
under the chrome browser.

This morning I have spent 5 hours trying to setup pulseaudio without
any success.

mplayer works using:
/usr/bin/mplayer -alang en -fs -ao alsa:device=plughw=1.3 ...

mpv works without specifying any audio


Going back to alsa, the Gemini AI tells me to invoke chrome as:
google-chrome --alsa-output-device=plughw:1,3 ....

I run chrome as root, and here is my invocation for fluxbox:
exec /usr/bin/google-chrome-stable --alsa-output-device=plughw:1,3 --window-size=1875,1050+0+0 --window-position=0,25 >/dev/null &

I have created the file /etc/asound.conf:
pcm.!default {
type plug
slave.pcm "hw:1,3"
}
ctl.!default {
type hw
card 1
}

according to Gemini.

I look at alsamixer, use F6 to set the NVIDIA card and
it is there and unmuted.

I then do:
alsactl store


When I try to start rc.alsa I get:

Loading ALSA mixer settings: /usr/sbin/alsactl restore
alsa-lib parser.c:242:(error_node) UCM is not supported for this HDA model (HDA Intel PCH at 0xf7720000 irq 46)
alsa-lib main.c:1405:(snd_use_case_mgr_open) error: failed to import hw:0 use case configuration -6
alsa-lib parser.c:242:(error_node) UCM is not supported for this HDA model (HDA NVidia at 0xf7080000 irq 17)
alsa-lib main.c:1405:(snd_use_case_mgr_open) error: failed to import hw:1 use case configuration -6

First off, the HDS Intel stuff is for the onboard hdmi, not the NVidia.

What is happening?

Again, thanks for any help.

[Marco Moock]

Post by root
This morning I have spent 5 hours trying to setup pulseaudio without
any success.

IIRC pulseaudio runs under the user itself, not as a system service.
pulseaudio --check should return $?=0.

I am currently not sitting at my Slackware system, so I can't check,
but I have running Pulseaudio in 15.0 and current.

Check pavucontrol. It must show outputs etc. and it must show the
applications playing sound.

Post by root
/usr/bin/mplayer -alang en -fs -ao alsa:device=plughw=1.3 ...

Using alsa.
Why on hell are you doing this?

Such applications are meant to run with normal user privileges and some
applications refuse to run under root.

Try with a regular user.

[root]

Post by Marco Moock

Post by root
This morning I have spent 5 hours trying to setup pulseaudio without
any success.

IIRC pulseaudio runs under the user itself, not as a system service.
pulseaudio --check should return $?=0.

I have another system that gives me sound using pulseaudio which
ran out of the box. That system, however runs only on the MB
video device.

Post by Marco Moock
Check pavucontrol. It must show outputs etc. and it must show the
applications playing sound.

I tried pavucontrol, but I didn't understand its output.
Asking the various online AI helpers, nothing they suggested
worked.

Post by Marco Moock

Post by root
/usr/bin/mplayer -alang en -fs -ao alsa:device=plughw=1.3 ...

Both mplayer and mpv give sound without either pulseaudio or
alsa running.

Post by Marco Moock
Why on hell are you doing this?

Because I choose to. Chrome will run as root and give sound as
proved by another machine on my system.

Regardless of whether I run as root, or get sound on chrome,
rc.alsa should install something that can be seen by ps aux.
It does not.

Using perpexlity I was told to modify /etc/rc.d/rc.alsa to
invoke it as:
/usr/sbin/alsactl --no-ucm store

which got rid of any error messages (after defining something
in /etc/udev/rules.d).

Even without any notifications, rc.alsa does not load.

Thanks for responding.

[Henrik Carlqvist]

Regardless of whether I run as root, or get sound on chrome, rc.alsa
should install something that can be seen by ps aux.
It does not.

rc.alsa simply loads some kernel modules and calls some tools which using
ioctls makes some settings like mixer levels. Alsa is basically a set of
drivers for your sound hardware, alsa in itself does not provide any kind
of daemon and no running daemon is needed to use your sound hardware.
However, without a daemon mixing sound from different applications, you
might have sound devices like /dev/audio which only is usable by one
application at a time.

I must admit that I am not very familiar with the sound mechanisms of
pulsaudio. Did you try the advice from Marco to check the return value
from "pulseaudio --check"?

Chrome is a third party software in Slackware, not included in stock
Slackware. Do you get sound from any stock browser like Firefox,
Konqueror or Seamonkey?

I agree with Marco that running a web browser as the root user is a
recipe for disaster. Any security hole in the browser will give a
malicous web site complete access to your entire system.

regards Henrik

[Marco Moock]

As far as pulseaudio, I can get sound on the machine I am writing
now. I only ventured into pulseaudio in hopes that it might
solve the sound problem on the other machine. After 5 hours
I know I never want anything to do with pulseaudio, or as
I believe its relative systemd.

Alsa has several restrictions. IIRC only one sound output to one
device, so they can block each other. I use Pulseaudio and it works
fine.

Although, all this stuff is not meant to run as root. I strongly
suggest to test as non-root.

[Rich]

Post by Marco Moock

As far as pulseaudio, I can get sound on the machine I am writing
now. I only ventured into pulseaudio in hopes that it might
solve the sound problem on the other machine. After 5 hours
I know I never want anything to do with pulseaudio, or as
I believe its relative systemd.

Alsa has several restrictions. IIRC only one sound output to one
device, so they can block each other. I use Pulseaudio and it works
fine.

ALSA has no such restriction.

Some hardware has that restriction, in which case unless one configures
Alsa to do mixing in the driver, multiple simultaneous outputs will
block each other.

But on hardware that provides a hardware mixer, ALSA will not block
simultaneous outputs, they just get mixed together.

[Alexander Grotewohl]

Post by Rich

Post by Marco Moock

As far as pulseaudio, I can get sound on the machine I am writing now.
I only ventured into pulseaudio in hopes that it might solve the sound
problem on the other machine. After 5 hours I know I never want
anything to do with pulseaudio, or as I believe its relative systemd.

Alsa has several restrictions. IIRC only one sound output to one
device, so they can block each other. I use Pulseaudio and it works
fine.

ALSA has no such restriction.
Some hardware has that restriction, in which case unless one configures
Alsa to do mixing in the driver, multiple simultaneous outputs will
block each other.
But on hardware that provides a hardware mixer, ALSA will not block
simultaneous outputs, they just get mixed together.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/ackchyually-actually-guy

It's pretty easy to verify, but instead you provided nothing of value lol

For example:
https://wiki.flightgear.org/Linux_software_audio_mixing_with_FlightGear

Reading and following the "Audio mixing what?" section, in particular.

The point is moot though. I'd recommend against him configuring ALSA any
further other than reverting what he's done. It's not going to be
beneficial in the long run if asound.conf gets overwritten when running
slackpkg, or he moves hardware around and none of his custom shortcuts
with random parameters work anymore, etc. Unless you'll be here to help,
of course. :)

In all likelihood he just has to revert the changes to asound.conf and
then set the default output device in pavucontrol.. and remove the command
line parameters from mpv, chrome, et al.

[Alexander Grotewohl]

Post by Alexander Grotewohl
In all likelihood he just has to revert the changes to asound.conf and
then set the default output device in pavucontrol.. and remove the
command line parameters from mpv, chrome, et al.

Thanks for responding. I have tried all the things you have mentioned.
asound.conf has no effect. I have set the default device using pactl
instead of pavucontrol, and also set it in default.pa Again no effect.
mpv plays videos without any command line parameter defining audio.
I would like to get the thing to work, but I have set up a KVM switch
and I can play through a PI4b running chrome and get sound.

Okay, a few things:

First just kill off everything in

/home/you/.config/pulse

Now run pulseaudio -k to restart it. Now everything should be baseline for
the next bits..

In pavucontrol, on the Output Devices tab, is your device show there? Is
the check mark to the right of it selected?

When you attempt to play audio with something like chrome, (or whatever
isn't working) .. in the Playback tab, does it show up and display
movement on the little VU meter? What if you force it with something like
"mpv --ao=pulse <some test file>" ?

In the configuration tab, what is the Profile dropdown set to?

For the contents of asound.conf are they:

pcm.default pulse
ctl.default pulse

These are what route programs that would normally use ALSA over through
PulseAudio instead.

Nothing in /etc/pulse has been adjusted? PulseAudio is supposed to start
on it's own automatically without the rc.d script.. you haven't done chmod
+x /etc/rc.d/rc.pulseaudio right?

The next step after that would be to check the logs to see what pulseaudio
is doing.. there are some steps to set it to be fairly verbose so you can
watch what's going on:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PulseAudio/Log

[root]

Post by Alexander Grotewohl
First just kill off everything in
/home/you/.config/pulse

This would be /root/.config.pulse
Several tdb and . sink source things were in there

Post by Alexander Grotewohl
Now run pulseaudio -k to restart it. Now everything should be baseline for
the next bits..

For pulseaudio -k I get:E: [pulseaudio] main.c: Failed to kill daemon: No such process
I assume you want to restart it: pulseaudio. I get three lines
W: cli-command.c /etc/pulse/default.pa.d
E: sink alsa.... does not exist (was what I got to work before)
E:GFet managed objects failed org.bluez was not provided by any .service files


These are not the exact messages because I am not responding on the
machine in question.

Post by Alexander Grotewohl
In pavucontrol, on the Output Devices tab, is your device show there? Is
the check mark to the right of it selected?

Yes, pavucontrol shows a plugged in hdmi display port and there is a green check

Post by Alexander Grotewohl
When you attempt to play audio with something like chrome, (or whatever
isn't working) .. in the Playback tab, does it show up and display
movement on the little VU meter? What if you force it with something like

I don't see a vu meter. On pavucontrol <playback> I only see with a blue
line running up to 100%.

Post by Alexander Grotewohl
"mpv --ao=pulse <some test file>" ?

mpv plays the video, but no sound.

Post by Alexander Grotewohl
In the configuration tab, what is the Profile dropdown set to?

That profile is set to a second digital stereo output: built in audio.
The command pactl list short sinks lists only auto_null.

Post by Alexander Grotewohl
pcm.default pulse
ctl.default pulse
These are what route programs that would normally use ALSA over through
PulseAudio instead.
Nothing in /etc/pulse has been adjusted? PulseAudio is supposed to start
on it's own automatically without the rc.d script.. you haven't done chmod
+x /etc/rc.d/rc.pulseaudio right?

Yes I had chmod +x on rc.pulseaudio. I am going to undo that and reboot the
system.

Miracle, I have sound. Moreover I am getting chrome sound on the support
monitor instead of the big screen. The support monitor is next to me
the big screen is on the other side of the room. Perfect.

Thank you very much.

Post by Alexander Grotewohl
The next step after that would be to check the logs to see what pulseaudio
is doing.. there are some steps to set it to be fairly verbose so you can
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PulseAudio/Log

[root]

Post by Alexander Grotewohl
In all likelihood he just has to revert the changes to asound.conf and
then set the default output device in pavucontrol.. and remove the command
line parameters from mpv, chrome, et al.

Thanks for responding. I have tried all the things you have mentioned. asound.conf
has no effect. I have set the default device using pactl instead of pavucontrol,
and also set it in default.pa Again no effect.

mpv plays videos without any command line parameter defining audio.

I would like to get the thing to work, but I have set up a KVM switch
and I can play through a PI4b running chrome and get sound.

[root]

Post by Rich

Post by Marco Moock
Alsa has several restrictions. IIRC only one sound output to one
device, so they can block each other. I use Pulseaudio and it works
fine.

ALSA has no such restriction.
Some hardware has that restriction, in which case unless one configures
Alsa to do mixing in the driver, multiple simultaneous outputs will
block each other.
But on hardware that provides a hardware mixer, ALSA will not block
simultaneous outputs, they just get mixed together.

I can't describe all the things I have tried to get sound. It turns
out that twice I did get sound. I am running an NVidia card that
has two hdmi outputs. One is a standard hdmi socket, and the other
is a DVI socket. I have a DVI-HDMI adapter on the DVI and I
feed the real HDMI to a large screen, and the adapted DVI to a
small screen just to my right. The real DVI is alsa hw:1,3, and
the adapted hdmi is alsa hw:1,7. When I do speaker-test on
these devices, both of them give sound as specified. Once
when I ran a speaker test I got a "busy" message and no sound
came out. I have never got two sources mixed ever on this machine.

That suggests to me, that it may be that both chrome and firefox
think they are sending sound out when they are not.

[root]

Post by Henrik Carlqvist

Regardless of whether I run as root, or get sound on chrome, rc.alsa
should install something that can be seen by ps aux.
It does not.

rc.alsa simply loads some kernel modules and calls some tools which using
ioctls makes some settings like mixer levels. Alsa is basically a set of
drivers for your sound hardware, alsa in itself does not provide any kind
of daemon and no running daemon is needed to use your sound hardware.
However, without a daemon mixing sound from different applications, you
might have sound devices like /dev/audio which only is usable by one
application at a time.
I must admit that I am not very familiar with the sound mechanisms of
pulsaudio. Did you try the advice from Marco to check the return value
from "pulseaudio --check"?
Chrome is a third party software in Slackware, not included in stock
Slackware. Do you get sound from any stock browser like Firefox,
Konqueror or Seamonkey?
I agree with Marco that running a web browser as the root user is a
recipe for disaster. Any security hole in the browser will give a
malicous web site complete access to your entire system.
regards Henrik

Thanks for responding Henrik. I ran Firefox and there is no sound
for that either. Mplayer runs when I tell it the alsa plug address
and the system has sound for the speaker tests.

As far as running as root, from my console I can run nine computers
on my network, not all of which are running at any one time. Six
are running 24/7. All my operations on the perpetual machines have
always been run as root. I only run a browser on one of those
machines, the one that now has no sound. I will try to think about
what file permissions I would have to change if I ran the browser
as an ordinary user.

As far as pulseaudio, I can get sound on the machine I am writing
now. I only ventured into pulseaudio in hopes that it might
solve the sound problem on the other machine. After 5 hours
I know I never want anything to do with pulseaudio, or as
I believe its relative systemd.

[root]

As far as pulseaudio, I can get sound on the machine I am writing
now. I only ventured into pulseaudio in hopes that it might
solve the sound problem on the other machine. After 5 hours
I know I never want anything to do with pulseaudio, or as
I believe its relative systemd.

In spite of the above, I went back and tried pulseadio again.
Briefly, I did:
pactl list short
and found two sinks.
I tried each one and neither gave me sound.
I tried other things suggested by Perplexity, but still
nothing works.

[root]

Post by root

As far as pulseaudio, I can get sound on the machine I am writing
now. I only ventured into pulseaudio in hopes that it might
solve the sound problem on the other machine. After 5 hours
I know I never want anything to do with pulseaudio, or as
I believe its relative systemd.

In spite of the above, I went back and tried pulseadio again.
pactl list short
and found two sinks.
I tried each one and neither gave me sound.
I tried other things suggested by Perplexity, but still
nothing works.

I tried it a third time, and I got it to work, but
the sound did not survive a reboot. I left /etc/default.pa
exactly as it was when it worked.

I want to drop this thread, I think too much depends
upon the NVidia card.

[RinaldiJ]

Post by root
Ever since I switched from 14.2 to 15.0 I have not had sound
under the chrome browser.
This morning I have spent 5 hours trying to setup pulseaudio without
any success.
/usr/bin/mplayer -alang en -fs -ao alsa:device=plughw=1.3 ...
mpv works without specifying any audio
google-chrome --alsa-output-device=plughw:1,3 ....
exec /usr/bin/google-chrome-stable --alsa-output-device=plughw:1,3 --window-size=1875,1050+0+0 --window-position=0,25 >/dev/null &
pcm.!default {
type plug
slave.pcm "hw:1,3"
}
ctl.!default {
type hw
card 1
}
according to Gemini.
I look at alsamixer, use F6 to set the NVIDIA card and
it is there and unmuted.
alsactl store
Loading ALSA mixer settings: /usr/sbin/alsactl restore
alsa-lib parser.c:242:(error_node) UCM is not supported for this HDA model (HDA Intel PCH at 0xf7720000 irq 46)
alsa-lib main.c:1405:(snd_use_case_mgr_open) error: failed to import hw:0 use case configuration -6
alsa-lib parser.c:242:(error_node) UCM is not supported for this HDA model (HDA NVidia at 0xf7080000 irq 17)
alsa-lib main.c:1405:(snd_use_case_mgr_open) error: failed to import hw:1 use case configuration -6
First off, the HDS Intel stuff is for the onboard hdmi, not the NVidia.
What is happening?
Again, thanks for any help.

I ignore alsa. I had a problem with pulseaudio in that if the HDMI
device (an Enigma Fire TV here) wasn't on when I booted, or had gone to
sleep from non use, pulseaudio output would not find it.

My solution was a $ killall pulseaudio and the device would be found and
activated.

Only problem was with the smplayer frontend with MPV or MPlayer.

VLC had no problems.

$ pavucontrol might be helpful/informational.

Rinaldi

[root]

Post by RinaldiJ
I ignore alsa. I had a problem with pulseaudio in that if the HDMI
device (an Enigma Fire TV here) wasn't on when I booted, or had gone to
sleep from non use, pulseaudio output would not find it.
My solution was a $ killall pulseaudio and the device would be found and
activated.
Only problem was with the smplayer frontend with MPV or MPlayer.
VLC had no problems.
$ pavucontrol might be helpful/informational.
Rinaldi

Thanks for responding Rinaldi, and my wife thanks you also.