Phonon doesn't recognize PulseAudio devices correctly (was working with Intrepid backports, stopped working with Jaunty)

[Cyberdyskinesia]

Binary package hint: phonon

In Intrepid with backports enabled Phonon since KDE 4.2 tries to "map" PulseAudio devices to ALSA/OSS devices if they both refer to the same physical device. Noone could dream of better integration of PulseAudio within KDE 4.

Now since my upgrade to Jaunty & KDE 4.2.3, Phonon splits PulseAudio devices from regular devices. On the attached screenshot the "blank" device at the top is the PulseAudio device (only shown if "Show advanced devices" ticked) refering to my USB soundcard back in Intrepid would have been merged with the second device on that list.

Removing all conf files related to Phonon and PulseAudio doesn't help.

Thanks for investigating.

[Cyberdyskinesia (cyberdyskinesia)]

This also happens with KDE 4.2.4 (from kubuntu-experimental PPA) and amarok-nightly-phonon from Amarok "Neon" nightly builds (which bundles some KDE 4.3 parts).

[Daniel T Chen (crimsun)]

Is this symptom reproducible in current karmic? (I can't reproduce it.)

[Cyberdyskinesia (cyberdyskinesia)]

Now in Karmic the unnamed devices disappeared BUT the tooltips for the physical devices still do not list PulseAudio devices.

The only way to use PulseAudio is to choose the device named "PulseAudio", that's even worse than Jaunty.

Daniel, what did you mean you can't reproduce it ? Does a "PulseAudio:/blablabla/blablah" appears in your tooltip bubble ?

[Julien Aubin (gojulgarbmail)]

Also got the same kind of problem when trying to listen for sounds using the PulseAudio engine under KDE. Many sound conflicts, and I think the issues I encounter are related to this bug.

[Julien Aubin (gojulgarbmail)]

Also have the "blank" peripherical phenomenon.

[Julien Aubin (gojulgarbmail)]

Nominated for release Karmic as having so many problems with sound in a modern operating system is unacceptable for the common user, even though Kubuntu is a really good system.

One side effect of this problem is that Flash plugin crashes in a web browser when a flash movie is seen while the user is listening to music, another one is the unability to listen to music in VLC (or at least behaviour is really erratic) and so on.

[Cyberdyskinesia (cyberdyskinesia)]

Hi Julien,

Indeed, Kubuntu developers should really look at what happened between Intrepid+backports and Jaunty, PulseAudio integration was nearly perfect in Intrepid (maybe thanks to a patch or something).

About your conflicts, have you set "PulseAudio" as the top item of every list in "K Menu -> System configuration -> Multimedia" ? Your problems most likely comes from Phonon trying to go straight to ALSA rather than passing sound through PulseAudio.

[Julien Aubin (gojulgarbmail)]

Hi Cyberdyskinesia,

Well, tried what you told and got no sound at all. (At least that's clear. :D) The only way to get sound working is to let Phonon access my audio card directly through Alsa. This is not a PulseAudio issue as sound works well under GNOME, only KDE brings problems.

Attached my lspci --vvnn for further information.

My sound card is NForce 570.

Julien.

[Julien Aubin (gojulgarbmail)]

Forgot to say : the "blank" device is unselectable for me...

[Cyberdyskinesia (cyberdyskinesia)]

Ah, you're still on Jaunty. It's unselectable because PulseAudio isn't running. Did you install it ? It doesn't come with the base installation for Kubuntu (however if you see the blank devices you probably had it once)

Once installed and KDE restarted Phonon will spawn PulseAudio and the blank devices should be selectable.

If you're on Jaunty forget what I said about the "PulseAudio" item, use the blank devices instead.

[Julien Aubin (gojulgarbmail)]

I am running Karmic.

I installed PulseAudio because I both installed ubuntu-desktop and kubuntu-desktop. I have only one blank devince which is unselectable.
If I select PulseAudio -> No sound at all.

Rgds,

Julien.

[Cyberdyskinesia (cyberdyskinesia)]

Ah yeah sorry, you had PulseAudio running on Jaunty. My "blank" devices disappeared because I removed all Phonon-related files in a desperate attempt to get back good PulseAudio support.

However you should have sound with the "PulseAudio" item. When an app is playing a sound it must appear in the first tab of "pavucontrol", the PulseAudio volume control tool. In that tool check also the fallback (= default) device and the Configuration tab.

[Julien Aubin (gojulgarbmail)]

Well, this has no effect, unfortunately. :-( The available devices do not map anything relevant for my hardware...

Tested PA under GNOME, and well, this works well, so this is really a KDE specific problem.

[Cyberdyskinesia (cyberdyskinesia)]

This isn't a duplicate of #447844 .

PulseAudio is the answer to that bug (assuming I'm not the only one for who got it working..). It's when audio is sent straight to ALSA that devices are being locked. Whereas if all audio is routed through PulseAudio, PulseAudio takes care of mixing all the flux before sending to the device.

[Cyberdyskinesia (cyberdyskinesia)]

Sorry for not being more help with your problem Julien..

Do you have you a /etc/asound.conf or a .asoundrc in your home directory (produced for example by asoundconf ?). If you do, remove it.

The default ALSA configuration send all audio to PulseAudio if pulseaudio is running (yeah it's like ALSA -> PulseAudio -> ALSA for compability purposes since most apps were written for ALSA), and tools such as asoundconf tend to override this.

[Julien Aubin (gojulgarbmail)]

Hi Cyberdyskinesia,

Greatly improved situation by rm -rf ~/.pulse*.
Well, all is not perfect but this is much better than what it was.

However I still notice some problems with Flash, and my PulseAudio is not responsive at all, but now that I rm -rfed my PulseAudio settings KDE falls back to ESD which is old, crappy, but at least works !!!

[Jonathan Thomas (echidnaman)]

The Phonon backends for Phonon 4.4 have received PulseAudio integration, where the backends themselves integrate with PulseAudio rather than it being a separate device Phonon can send sound to. This should fix the issues here.

[Jonathan Thomas (echidnaman)]

Hmm, it is still showing up as a separate device for Xine... anyways, if further issues pop up in KDE 4.4/Kubuntu 10.04, I'd recommend filing a bug at bugs.kde.org.