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Re: Can't get sound to work



Le 16.01.2015 19:24, Robert Latest a écrit :
On Thu, 15 Jan 2015 19:43:23 -0500
Ric Moore <wayward4now@gmail.com> wrote:

On 01/15/2015 03:54 PM, Hans wrote:
> First questions:
>
> Are you running pulseaudio or alsa?

I don't know. I seem to have both on my system. I don't know what the
difference is, or if one is running on top of the other, or if they are fighting over my soundcard. How would an application that wants to play
sound figure out which system to use?

There are several people more knowledgeable than me around here, but, AFAIK, alsa is the lowest level sound manager. If I am not wrong, pulse audio is built on it. Note that I never tried PA: alsa always worked just fine for me, so why should I try it?
I understand the linux Audio stack like this:

Alsa ==> OSS
  ^
  |
  ^
/  \
PA  J

Alsa is better (why? No idea, just what people says...) than OSS, and then you have 2 frameworks which works over Alsa. PulseAudio (PA, which seems to be POSIX and windows compatible), and Jack (J, which seems to be used by professional applications, for real-time stuff and other.

If you simply want sound from flash-player, iceweasel and mplayer... well, removing PA may help you, and it will remove something you do not necessarily need. And, in my opinion, less code running on my computer means less surprises (on my computer), so it's the way I choose. But, I am a minimalist lover (well, at least in computing... for beers per example I have different tastes ;) ).

Note that I have no opinion about the quality of pulse audio and jack. Plus, in some cases, I had problems with microphones with Alsa. Maybe in those situations PA or jack would have helped me. Never tried, it was not important enough for me.

Maybe if the OP mv;d that file to another name,
rebooted and ran alsamixer first, then add pavucontrol along with
pulse, he might have a better experience, IMHO.

I'll try that (have to install first). If it works, can I then purge all
ALSA-related stuff from my system? Or could I also remove all
pulse-related stuff and keep ALSA?

If you purge alsa-related stuff, you will end with no sound at all.
Alsa means "Advanced Linux Sound Architecture". It seems to be a driver replacement for OSS. In short, it would be like removing your nouveau/nvidia/intel/whatever driver and trying to run Xorg or weston... Xorg and weston would be PA and Jack, the driver would be alsa. That's what I understand, at least.


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