Ubuntu

Adobe Flash sound, ALSA, and PulseAudio no longer work

Asked by Collin Stocks

I'm running Ubuntu 8.10 on a Pan4 computer from System76. It's 64 bit dual core. A little while ago, ALSA stopped working (it started making crackling sounds) and PulseAudio stopped working (made no sound at all). OSS still works perfectly. However, Flash either uses one of the others or it uses its own thing to play sound, and so is completely silent.

The problem may have started when I changed the name of my user account, but I have since made sure that my user account is a member of the pulse related groups. I also made sure that I had the privileges needed under user privileges for playing audio. Still, neither of those two sounds systems works.

It would be great if I could just get flash to use OSS, but I have no idea how to do that.

I can run flash on Windows XP in a virtual machine and the sound works, but that is an annoyingly processor intensive hack just to play flash movies.

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Simone Cianfriglia
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Best Simone Cianfriglia (crimer) said : 		#1

One day I had the same problem after a simple reboot and I solved it by setting the mixer with gnome-volume-control.
It could seem a joke, but it's true...

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Collin Stocks (collinstocks) said : 		#2

Thanks Crimer, that solved my question.

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Collin Stocks (collinstocks) said : 		#3

Yeah, that was it, at least for flash. I'll have to see if ALSA and PulseAudio still don't work, though. If they don't, I'll open a new question.

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Collin Stocks (collinstocks) said : 		#4

Oh, by the way, I fixed it by changing the volume of PCM under ALSA sound mixer. So, ALSA seems to be working. I don't know about PulseAudio, but I don't really care that much since lots of stuff still uses ALSA.

I believed you because I've had this sort of weird problem before where the microphone would be working, and then suddenly would stop working at all in any program, even ones that seemed to be using the device and not a sound server (like Skype).

Thanks for the advice, Crimer.

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Spang (hetkot) said : 		#5

Hmm,

My Ubuntu suffered from the same symptoms and this answer helped me out to find the solution. I did have to raise my pcm level from 0 as well, which is strange because I don't recall lowering it after my sound stopped working. (And I wasn't anywhere near it before my sound stopped working.)

Anyhow Thx