Oh joy! I really wish the developers had not taken this route with pulse audio. Because of this, I have had no end of issues when trying to output screen reader audio to my headphones using a standard stereo audio output. My machine has SpDIF and HDMI outputs as well as analog, yet I have not been able to get analog working with any degree of functionality. I literally have to ssh into that machine and run console based programs because I can’t interact with that machine directly.
Thanks for the info on where to locate good example programs. Btw, the machine in question is my RaspberryPi 3 that I was trying to setup for the seeing with sound project. -Eric From the Central Offices of the Technomage Guild, Technical difficulties resolution Dept. > On Nov 20, 2020, at 7:58 AM, Matt Graham via PLUG-discuss > <[email protected]> wrote: > > The firefox developers have basically said, "The microphone on your computer > won't work at all unless you use pulseaudio."[0] I've been trying to avoid > pulseaudio for various reasons.[1] But since Thanksgiving is canceled this > year, I'll have to see the family virtually, and why not do that with > bigbluebutton.org ? This led me to a twisty maze of unwarranted assumptions > and outright stupidity, which I will try to summarize below. TL;DR: > pulseaudio hates analog audio and making analog audio work properly requires > editing config files by hand. > > I first tried building pulseaudio and firefox with the pulseaudio USE flag on > my laptop. This worked almost perfectly. I expected this to work basically > identically on my desktop, because both machines use sound cards that are > driven by the snd_hda_intel module. Nope! > > pulseaudio has a strong preference for digital audio. Its autodetection will > select the first digital device it finds as the default audio output. For > me, this was the HDMI output... which is hooked up to the TV, which is almost > never on. My actual sound card was also found, but it wasn't the default > output, and it was set to output sound to the iec-958-stereo-output (S/PDIF > jack). I do not have anything plugged in to that. Setting the default > output to the analog sound card didn't work; pulseaudio refused to write any > data to the analog card. > > I found a solution at > https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio/Examples , link "Simultaneous > HDMI and analog output". If a digital device exists, pulseaudio refuses to > send data to analog devices unless it can *also* send data to a digital > device. This makes no sense. I have no idea how ordinary users would deal > with this problem. The solution was to put the lines: > > # make pulseaudio work with analog and digital things at > # the same time. Load analog device (NOTE: use aplay -l > # to find the hw: numbers for the device you need, they > # will be displayed as "card X: (name) device Y: and you > # need to put those numbers in there. X and Y for me > # were both 0 because my analog card's first on the > # PCI bus. YMMV.) > load-module module-alsa-sink device=hw:X,Y > load-module module-combine-sink sink_name=combined > set-default-sink combined > > ...up at the top of the /etc/pulse/default.pa file. I have no idea how > Mint/Ubuntu et al would handle this for ordinary users. There is no way to > do any of this with the slightly more user-friendly pavucontrol[2]. I've had > these speakers for 21 years, which may be a bit unusual, but are people > really abandoning analog sound? Regardless, I'm leaving this here in the > hopes that some crawler will find it and some search engine will lead someone > to a quicker fix than the multiple-hour @#%^ing around I had to do. > > [0] "Select the audio input and output devices that exist and put them into 2 > lists, have user choose speaker/mike from those 2 lists" is apparently much > more difficult with ALSA than with pulseaudio or whatever OS X/Doze provides. > Or the firefox developers are lazy and clueless. > > [1] Poettering, nuff said. > > [2] Our UX experts have determined that the best way to deal is to pretend > we're a phone! So the menubar doesn't act like a menubar acts in real > applications! Isn't that edgy and disruptive? > > -- > Crow202 Blog: http://crow202.org/wordpress > There is no Darkness in Eternity > But only Light too dim for us to see. > --------------------------------------------------- > PLUG-discuss mailing list - [email protected] > To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: > https://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - [email protected] To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: https://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
