sound problems - don't shout at me, i have googled already

[tinmice]

I was using spotify under wine and had a problem where it paused, read a post and it suggested changing the wine preferences to OSS rather than ALSA to fix it. It didn't work, and what's worse is that now none of my sound works.

I've searched a lot a tried many things, checked alsa-mixer, checked all volumes, purged and reinstalled linux-sound-architecture, alsa-base and alsa-utils, removed pulseaudio (another thread suggestion) all to no avail. Root does not have sound either.

I don't understand how a reinstall of the sound files after a purge does not work, my understanding of the workings of ubuntu audio is limited though. Help would be hugely appreciated as this has been driving me mental all day.

Cheers.

[hatebreed]

so now your sound doesn't work on the desktop either? have you tried multiple audio players? and make sure that your audio options are set back to pulseaudio as default cause some cards don't like the oss.

[previso]

What Distro? May have to go through the hardware/sound settings again and to the "test" there.

[tueglee]

When I installed Ubuntu some years back, I also had sound problems (home made systems) - as I recall, almost every time there was a kernel update - so I changed to Fedora. Anyways, this site helped me considerably when I still used Ubuntu:

ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=205449

as did this:

www . alsa-project.org/main/index.php

good luck.

[tinmice]

Thanks for the websites tueglee, the comprohensive sound guide site is very good, unfortunately I've tried most of it already. I'm running xubuntu 10.04 and it's pretty much a clean install, which makes it even more annoying, I seem to have to reinstall everytime something like this happens, trying as much as I can to avoid it this time.

I selected the OSS option under the wine config and tried Spotify, no sound at all since on anything. Tried different players, different files, signing in as root etc...

I haven't reinstalled the pulseaudio since I tried uninstalling it as suggested on the forums link above. How does ALSA, OSS and Pulseaudio link together? I'm not quite sure how the setup is supposed to work in order to provide a working sound system. I have tried to look for a simple explanation, but to no avail. Also, there aren't any 'Audio Options' in XFCE unlike Gnome.

Cheers.

[tinmice]

bump, please help!

[hatebreed]

are you having trouble in wine only? do you get sound in the desktop?

[Fire Hawk]

Hi

ALSA and OSS are sound architectures. They both provide ways of working and interacting with audio devices (playing sounds and recording and such).

I believe OSS is a bit older than ALSA.

Have you tried running alsaconf? I am not sure if it is part of alsa, or if it comes with certain distributions, but it is worth a try.

Also, have you added any new audio devices since (such as usb devices or anything similar)?

[tinmice]

Running alsaconf doesn't do anything, not found on the system. I did a search to see if it was an installable package, but nothing showed up.

hatebreed - I've got no sound on the system at all, the problem was just caused by wine as far as I'm aware.

How does pulseaudio fit in to this then? One site suggested removing it, that didn't work, so I've installed it again now via synaptic. I followed a tutorial on installing and calibrating it, but it hasn't made any difference either.

Sorry for the noob questions, when I've had a sound problem before I've just reinstalled, getting sick of doing that though. Would it be possible to remove all sound-control packages and then copy over files from a live cd so that it is essentially running as a new-install?

[MikeTbob]

I would suggest that you fire up your most favorite LiveCD in the whole wide world and issue the lsmod command to list all loaded modules so you can write the names down. Now reboot to the non working install and use the modprobe command to load whichever sound modules you need. Hopefully it will be missing a module or two and this would be an easy fix.