"Test speakers" is silent

[Benjamin Drung]

Binary package hint: gnome-media

My speakers are working fine (I can year playback with Banshee and VLC), but "Test speakers" is silent. I hear nothing when I press on the "Test" button.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.04
Package: gnome-media 2.32.0-0ubuntu5
Uname: Linux 2.6.38-020638-generic x86_64
Architecture: amd64
Date: Wed Mar 16 20:30:19 2011
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" - Alpha amd64 (20100921.1)
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=de_DE:en
 LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: gnome-media
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to natty on 2011-03-11 (5 days ago)

[Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre (cyphermox)]

Confirming, I can't hear anything either, no matter which device I try "Test" with.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

could be a gstreamer issue as well

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

or a libcanberra issue, is canberra-gtk-play working for you?

[Benjamin Drung (bdrung)]

I tried "canberra-gtk-play -f testsample.wav" and it seems to play the file, but I hear nothing.

[stef70 (stephane-chauveau-central)]

I discovered that Ihe sound test only works if I " Enable windows and buttons sounds" in the 1st tab

[Steve Magoun (smagoun)]

This affects OEM testing, so adding to oem-priority.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Steve, not sure what testing you do exactly but it seems that enabling the option mentioned in comment #6 is an easy workaround which should let you test sound if that's what you are doing

[Robert Ancell (robert-ancell)]

Turns out the cause is the ubuntu-sounds package doesn't provide the test sounds, and gnome-volume-control falls back to playing the bell sound instead. But, the bell sound is only played when "Enable windows and buttons sounds" is enabled.

The solution is to install sound-theme-freedesktop which provides these sounds.

I'm guessing this will be easy for OEM to add to their images, but I also recommend that this is installed in standard Ubuntu as ubuntu-sounds does not provide all the audio events.

[Robert Ancell (robert-ancell)]

So there's potentially a couple of bugs here:
gnome-media: Probably shouldn't fall back to a sound that can't be played
ubuntu-desktop: Probably should depend on sound-theme-freedesktop
ubuntu-sounds: May want to consider adding more sound effects if we don't want any other themes installed

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Would it be reasonable to copy the test sound into the Ubuntu sound theme? Seeding it would both waste CD space, as well as not really fix the actual bug that the sound theme is incomplete, and thus remixes of Ubuntu (OEM or other flavours) would still miss it.

[David Henningsson (diwic)]

Today's findings, I'll just write them down here and create proper patches later as I'm running out of time:

* for ubuntu-sounds, I recommend we symlink audio-test-signal.ogg -> phone-incoming-call.ogg. The latter one is the only sound that's long and clear enough to be heard even with HDMI/digital receivers (that cut off some of the initial signal).

* the other problem is that speaker-test does not pick up the sound theme. Whether this is gnome-media's or libcanberra's fault can be debated, but it was more easily hacked in gnome-media, excerpt from a patched gvc-speaker-test.c:

static void
gvc_speaker_test_set_theme (ca_context *ca)
{
        GtkSettings *s = gtk_settings_get_for_screen(gdk_screen_get_default());
        gchar *theme_name = NULL;

        if (!s) return;

        g_object_get(G_OBJECT(s), "gtk-sound-theme-name", &theme_name, NULL);

        if (theme_name) {
                ca_context_change_props(ca, CA_PROP_CANBERRA_XDG_THEME_NAME, theme_name, NULL);
                g_free(theme_name);
        }
}

static void
gvc_speaker_test_init (GvcSpeakerTest *speaker_test)
{
        GtkWidget *face;

        speaker_test->priv = GVC_SPEAKER_TEST_GET_PRIVATE (speaker_test);

        ca_context_create (&speaker_test->priv->canberra);
        ca_context_set_driver (speaker_test->priv->canberra, "pulse");
        ca_context_change_props (speaker_test->priv->canberra,
                                 CA_PROP_APPLICATION_ID, "org.gnome.VolumeControl",
                                 NULL);
        gvc_speaker_test_set_theme(speaker_test->priv->canberra);

[David Henningsson (diwic)]

Debdiff for the gnome-media problem

[David Henningsson (diwic)]

Debdiff for ubuntu-sounds

[Benjamin Drung (bdrung)]

Please forward your fix to upstream.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package gnome-media - 2.32.0-0ubuntu7

---------------
gnome-media (2.32.0-0ubuntu7) natty; urgency=low

  * debian/patches/14_sound_theme.patch:
    - Fix problem with speaker test not picking up the
      correct sound theme (LP: #736349)
 -- David Henningsson <email address hidden> Wed, 06 Apr 2011 20:07:11 +0200

[Benjamin Drung (bdrung)]

The ubuntu-sounds patch does not seem to have an effect on my system. I am not convinced that phone-incoming-call.ogg is a better test sound. The sounds in /usr/share/sounds/alsa are much better for a speaker test.

Btw, you close the wrong bug in the ubuntu-sounds patch.

[David Henningsson (diwic)]

Ok, thanks for uploading.
It seems like with the gnome-media patch only we're back to Maverick's behavior of playing bell.ogg, the very minor "thug" or "bong" sound of 0.2 seconds. (Can you confirm?)
Which means that I should file a separate bug for having a too short sound in the speaker test.

[David Henningsson (diwic)]

I have now upstreamed the bug: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=646996

[Benjamin Drung (bdrung)]

Yes, it plays the very minor "thug" or "bong" sound.

[Dave Walker (davewalker)]

Can someone comment if the bug tasks against ubuntu-meta and ubuntu-sounds is still an issue?

Thanks.

[David Henningsson (diwic)]

I believe it isn't.

[Robert Ancell (robert-ancell)]

Since upgrading a few days ago, I'm getting the original behaviour (only bell sound and only if window and button sounds are enabled). It doesn't use the freedesktop sound theme anymore. Interestingly, disabling the patch also doesn't make it work.

[Lucio (luciofrmoreira)]

For me, installing libcanberra-pulse worked.

[OliFre (freyermuth)]

> For me, installing libcanberra-pulse worked.

So many thanks for this!
This is still required to fix things on Ubuntu 18.04!

[Jean-Pierre van Riel (jpvr)]

See https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/1774904/comments/4. gnome-control-center should rather add libcanberra-pulse to depends rather than just recommends.