No sound in games only? Ubuntu 9.04

[HaNgoc]

Hello all,

I have switched over to ubuntu 9.04 from windows. Everything is good and I even got some cool games up and running.

Then I tried to open my sound for 5.1 as I understand the default is 2 channels. After doing this in the terminal, I tried to play some of the games and there is no sound!!

BUt I can listen to music in rhythmbox and video play back works perfectly.

Any idea how to enable the sound in the games? I did check the options in the game menus and all sound in open, as it was working perfectly just a few hours before.

Thanks for any help offered.

[D-cat]

Question: Have you tried restarting the sound daemons (ALSA and PulseAudio), or the whole computer, after making the configuration changes?

What were the changes you made?

What is your sound card? (terminal command: lspci -nnk | grep -iA 2 audio )

Failing the restart, check each game for sound output options. They should be set to Pulse or ALSA. Open Sound System (OSS) is largely obsolete and is emulated (barely) only for compatibility with older programs.

You can try upgrading your PulseAudio server to the latest version (from source... 0.9.15 has several bug fixes (0.9.17 is currently available), but is itself a project for newbies).

Finally, is the option to dump PulseAudio in its entirety and run pure ALSA (replace Pulse with Esound so Gnome sounds still work).

[HaNgoc]

Hello D-cat,

Thank you for the detailed info. I have decided to re-install ubuntu and log any changes I make to the terminal so I can trouble shoot better next time.

Would yo have any advice on the best way to set up my sound system (creative labs 5.1) I understand that ubuntu defaults to 2 channel sound but I don't want to risk losing sound again on the games.

Any guides or advice you could offer for a fresh install? I have only installed the restricted codec packages at this point and will now log what activity I perform in the terminal for trouble shooting next time,

Thank you