Re: Gnome Audio Alerts
Fortunately, the audio card was recognized. I am able to use the audio
card to play music and videos, etc. It is only the audio alerts from
gnome that do not work. Since then, I had another problem with my
system which resulted in dumping many of my personal settings (read
config files). When gnome came back up, the alerts were working again.
Somewhere in one of the configuration files in my personal directory
there was an odd setting that caused the problem. Unfortunately, I have
no idea which file or what setting. But in any event, the alerts are
again working the way they are supposed to.
I suspect that many of the intermittent and odd problems I have from
time to time on this system is the result of using an old laptop
(Gateway M675). Several features of the linux system are non-functional
on this laptop, especially the ability to suspend to ram, or hibernate
to disk. I've done some research, and this is a common problem with all
linux distros with this laptop. As far as I can tell, no one has solved
that particular problem.
Thank you for responding to my post, Martin. I appreciate your help.
On Tue, 2015-09-22 at 07:03 -0500, Martin McCormick wrote:
> Jose Martinez <jomartinez812@gmail.com> writes:
> > On Sat, 2015-09-05 at 02:42 -0400, Ric Moore wrote:
> > Thank you for your response, Ric. I hadn't tried alsamixer. In fact,
> > I've never pulled the alsa mixer up since install, I'm using PulseAudio,
> > and so have used the PulseAudio controls. In any event, I'm not sure
> > what I should see with the alsa mixer, but I only have a master playback
> > control, which is at 100% and a capture control, also set for 100%.
> > There are no other controls available on the alsamixer. I'm almost to
> > the point of completely un-installing gnome, and then re-installing
> > gnome from scratch (if that is even possible) to see if I can get them
> > back. I play music and other audio all the time, but I also use the
> > audio notifications, especially for email, and hate it when they are
> > out.
>
> You should have a few more sound controlls and they
> usually have less granularity than 1/100TH. Some have 16 or 32
> discrete levels and you can set them to X% but that X% rounds up
> or down to the nearest setting. If your card shows 0 to 31 level
> settings, amixer will, for example, set the level to 8 if you ask
> for 50%. If you ask for 51%, it will still probably set the level
> to 8 because there isn't a discrete level in the hardware that
> neatly correspond to 51%.
>
> In many cases, this isn't that bad since your ears can
> normally not detect changes up or down of much less than 3 DB.
> What you are actually dealing with is the driver's interpretation
> of what the hardware for your sound interface will allow you to do.
>
> I had something somewhat similar happen earlier this year
> when I stopped using pulseaudio due to several weird behaviors of
> sound which, on this older Dell system, is always itching to
> break any time I upgrade Debian. After upgrading from squeeze to
> wheezy, the CS4236 on-board sound chip disappeared so
> $ aplay -l
> produced only external sound cards such as usb cards or a SBLive
> card as Card 0.
>
> After turning off pulseaudio, amixer for Card 0 produced
> an output something like the one you described.
> aplay -l showed no Card 0 and 1 Card 1. amixer for Card 1 showed
> all the bells and whistles that should have been there and they
> worked. Playing something using Card 0 would play the audio file
> but all the controls but playback and possibly capture were gone
> and playback had that fake 0-100 range of granularity.
>
> This, by the way, was all under the command-line, no
> gnome so when the system gets confused about sound hardware and
> the drivers being used, the problems show up in all kinds of odd
> or missing behavior.
>
> On this system, I guess the CS4236 is a goner for
> anything above squeeze which is a pain because that on-board
> sound system used inputs from the PC speaker beeper and could
> send outputs from the analog sound card to the little speaker
> making it possible to send analog sound to that device if one
> needed to.
>
> Martin
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