no sound

[Francis Marsden]

   Using xubuntu 14.04. I bought a pair of polk hampden speakers. I had a bit of a struggle to get them to work with the digital connection (usb) but now it seems that all sound programs work, except for mail-notification. (The analog connection never worked for these new speakers, and I didn't want it anyway.) The program works properly except the sound notifier doesn't play any file. (It worked with my older analog speakers.)

   When mail-notification properties is opened, and I try to test play a wav file in the selection window, no sound is heard. But the "stop" button becomes unshaded for a fraction of a second and then becomes shaded out again. I tried playing a much longer sound file and the same thing happened. It seems like the program starts to play the file and then something immediately crashes. In configuration editor, the generic command for mail-notification to play a sound file is:

 exec gst-launch-0.10 filesrc location=%file ! decodebin ! audioconvert ! gconfaudiosink >/dev/null 2>&1

   I opened a terminal and put the command in, with " file " replaced by an actual file location, as follows:

exec gst-launch-0.10 filesrc location=%/home/marsdenf/Music/Notification Sounds/dogbarkMuchLouder.wav ! decodebin ! audioconvert ! gconfaudiosink >/dev/null 2>&1

   After pressing enter in the terminal, the terminal immediately closed out (crashed) and no sound was heard.

Any suggestions?

[Francis Marsden (marsdenf)]

I realized my mistake in including the " % " character with the command, and tried it without it, and the same thing happened. I also tried renaming the file " Notification Sounds " to " NotificationSounds " to eliminate the white space, but the same thing happened. (The whitespace had not been a problem before the new speakers.)

[Raony Guimarães (raonyguimaraes)]

I have the same problem in ubuntu 16.04 . I tried in a different distro (Arch Linux) and it works out of the box ... Not sure how to debug this bug ... I will try to compile from source.

[Massimo Dal Zotto (dz)]

No sound also for me in ubuntu 16.04, but I found an easy fix.

With gconf-editor I found that the play-command configured in mail-notification is wrong:

  $ gconftool --get /apps/mail-notification/sounds/play-command
  exec gst-launch-1.0 filesrc location=%file ! decodebin ! audioconvert ! gconfaudiosink >/dev/null 2>&1

Running the command by hand gives this error:

  $ gst-launch-1.0 filesrc location=/usr/share/mail-notification/new-mail.wav \! decodebin \! audioconvert \! gconfaudiosink
  WARNING: erroneous pipeline: no element "gconfaudiosink"

The solution is to change the play-command to use pulsesink instead of gconfaudiosink:

  gconftool --set /apps/mail-notification/sounds/play-command --type string \
          "exec gst-launch-1.0 filesrc location=%file ! decodebin ! audioconvert ! pulsesink >/dev/null 2>&1"

With this change I get the usual drum sound for each new mail.

[Massimo Dal Zotto (dz)]

Accordingly to this bug report (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/checkbox/+bug/978895) the correct plugin to use is autoaudiosink:

  gconftool --set /apps/mail-notification/sounds/play-command --type string \
            "exec gst-launch-1.0 filesrc location=%file ! decodebin ! audioconvert ! autoaudiosink >/dev/null 2>&1"

[Andre Mangan (kyphi)]

The gconf-tool setting to pulsesink works. Thank you Massimo.

The gconf-tool setting to autoaudiosink does not work for me.

Using Linux Mint 18 Cinnamon 64bit...and the amendment survives a reboot.

[Andre Mangan (kyphi)]

Long after the last posting, now using Linux Mint 18.2, again mail-notification sound does not work.

This time, the gconf-tool setting to pulsesink does nothing but setting it to autoaudiosink does work.

[Marin Dorić (chucky72)]

gconftool --set /apps/mail-notification/sounds/play-command --type string \
          "exec gst-launch-1.0 filesrc location=%file ! decodebin ! audioconvert ! pulsesink >/dev/null 2>&1"

fixed my sound