sound problems

[Amadeus W.M.]

On Tue, 29 Jan 2008 13:15:38 -0800, Gerhard Magnus wrote:

> I've recently installed FC8 and have been trying to get the sound to
> work. The system-config-soundcard plays its tune but everything else is
> silent. Back in the day, you only had to turn up the volume on alsamixer
> but now when I try starting alsamixer I get the message " ***
> PULSEAUDIO: Unable to connect: Connection refused."
> 
> Does each application have to be configured to work with pulseaudio?
> 
> Why does something as simple as sound on a PC require a Senior Tech to
> work in Fedora?
> 
> For starters:
> (1) How do I get the mplayer plugin I have up and running in Firefox to
> include sound?
> (2) How do I get sound from xmms?
> 
> Any roadmaps or even pointers in the right direction would be
> appreciated.
> 
> Jerry



If you run mplayer at the prompt, then 

mplayer -ao pulse ... # will use pulse 
mplayer -ao alsa ... # will use alsa, if yo so prefer, which is the 
default in mplayer. 

To force it to use pulse by default put 

ao = pulse 

in ~/.mplayer/config

I guess if you do that, then mplayer plug-in would have sound too.


I no longer use xmms, but I remember it had a menu where you could select 
which sound system to use (alsa, oss, esd). Not sure if it has pulseaudio 
yet. 

I am using pulseaudio ok for the most part, with two exceptions:

1) When watching a full length movie with mplayer in full screen mplayer 
freezes after about 20-30 minutes into the movie (but I can go to another 
screen, open a shell and kill it). This only happens with pulseaudio, not 
with alsa, so I'm using mplayer with alsa (although I haven't tested this 
behavior with the latest updates).

2) flite (which is used by things like roadnav, or mail notification) 
doesn't know about pulseaudio, or I don't know how to tell it to use 
pulseaudio, so I can't use it at all, which is too bad. I think flite is 
a good replacement for festival, and should become the default speech 
synthesis system. Hope this bug will be fixed in a future release. 

I can get flite (and probably anything else) to work with alsa if I 
remove alsa-plugins-pulseaudio (no need to remove other pulseaudio rpms). 
I'm ok with pulseaudio for now.