Re: No sound

[David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk>]

On Tue 14 May 2019 at 16:09:23 (-0000), Curt wrote:
> On 2019-05-12, 70147persson@telia.com <70147persson@telia.com> wrote:
> >
> > I have no sound at all. By starting e.g. VLC or Audacity with a 
> > *.wav file I can see this executed, in Audacity also the wave form, but 
> > nothing from the loudspeaker.
> 
> Since July, 2018?
> 
> https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2018/07/msg00424.html

Thanks for the reference. Reading "Since I am not very skilled in the
sound technology I have previously, when I carried out this operation,
randomly installed every package I found, which seemed to deal with
sound until it all worked, but this time my intention is to do the job
in a more deliberate way", I should point out that I went in the
opposite direction, avoiding using anthing but Alsa to start with.
There are bits of pulse and jack installed as dependencies of things
like mplayer and mpv, but I don't use (?configure) them.

The tricky bit I ran into was that this laptop has two cards, and
the default is the HDMI one which I only use occasionally. More
annoyingly, that HDMI device has two subdevices (why?), and I haven't
figured out how it decides which to use, nor how to force it to
consistently choose one of them. So I have a script that flips between
the two when needed.

Specifically for jack, I can see some future use for it on this
laptop as there is no obvious way of recording sound coming from,
say, the browser into a wav file (except via the microphone which is
obviously not satisfactory). But at the moment I use a desktop to
perform that task, just as I have done for a couple of decades now.

So jack, pulse and all the rest might have their uses, but I reckon
it's best to start at the simple end with Alsa, and add other software
as and when you need their functionality, rather than throwing
everything at the system and hoping something (but what?) makes
sound come out.

Cheers,
David.