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I have a very unique issue, and I have absolutely no idea what is going on.

I got a new computer, using Debian, that my dad made using spare parts. It worked just fine, until about a month after I got it, when I decided I should start adding audio to the game I'm programming. That's when I realized that my audio wasn't working. I asked my dad for help. At first he refused, saying that I would learn more by doing it myself. But eventually, he agreed to help.

He did a bunch of stuff in the terminal, and he then opened a program called qjackctl. He started the JACK audio server, waited a bit, then stopped it. Music started playing the moment he stopped it. He didn't explain what he did, and said he was just checking if it was even possible to get the audio working. It worked until I rebooted the computer. I then tried to replicate what he did, and I opened qjackctl, started it, then stopped it. My audio started working again.

I kept doing this for the next week or two, and one day it stopped working. I have no idea why. All I did each of those days were just Python & Pygame programming. I kept experimenting with qjackctl, and the program output said something about killing pulseaudio (can't remember exactly what it said). So I opened top (type "top" in terminal), killed pulseaudio, started and stopped the program, and my audio started working again. I kept doing that for about a week every time I rebooted, then it magically stopped working again. Does anyone know how to fix this, and, preferably, make it permanent?

I've spent quite a while researching how to fix this, but I haven't found anything, so I decided to see if anybody else could figure it out.

EDIT: I just looked in the KDE settings, and I noticed that the only item in the multimedia audio section is Pulseaudio. Nothing else shows up, not even alsa. I really need this information, any help is greatly appreciated.

Douglas - 15 year old Pythoner
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1 Answers1

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on debian gnu/linux youve got a lot of different ways to produce audio output. The base system would probably be the alsa interface of the linux kernel which can be accessed by an userland application directly or through a sound server (which is also an userland application). The two sound server softwares i know are pulseaudio and jackd. Both are different implementations with different design concepts. jackd is meant to be more in the professional audio studio area while pulseaudio is meant to give a easy sound system for desktop systems.

It is only possible to run one of those on top of one alsa device (sound card). And if you would like to access your alsa device directly none of that should use it.

So first of all i would check what interface (pulseaudio, jack, alsa) is supported by the application that you want to use to generate audio output. After that you should get sure that the appropriated components are running. For example you can install mplayer which is capable of using all of that methodes. There you can use the option -ao to select the interface you want. Here you see a sample.

$ mplayer -ao help
Failed to read /etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf.local: No such file or directory
Warning unknown option include at line 177
MPlayer SVN-r37289 (C) 2000-2013 MPlayer Team
Available audio output drivers:
    oss OSS/ioctl audio output
    alsa    ALSA-0.9.x-1.x audio output
    pulse   PulseAudio audio output
    jack    JACK audio output
    sdl SDLlib audio output
    mpegpes DVB audio output
    v4l2    V4L2 MPEG Audio Decoder output
    null    Null audio output
    pcm RAW PCM/WAVE file writer audio output

Your description sounds like if your application is using plain alsa only and is inhibited by a running pulseaudio instance. Even tho pulseaudio has got a simulated alsa through pulse interface but that is often not working correctly. So if that the case i would suggest to uninstall pulseaudio by running

 apt-get remove pulseaudio

as root.

You can find many information about alsa, pulseaudio and jack using the Internet search engine off your choice. The arch linux wiki has a lot of good hints for example:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/JACK_Audio_Connection_Kit

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Advanced_Linux_Sound_Architecture

except packaging it can be applied to debian to

the rest is figuring it out by trail and error...

i wish you much success

treaki
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  • Sorry, I forgot to mention, my computer at home has no internet access, so I can't use anything that's not already on there. My parents don't trust me enough to have internet access, but my dad did install almost the entire Debian archive (hundreds of gigabytes!), so I probably do have mplayer already. I'll check when I get home (I'm in school right now). Thank you! – Douglas - 15 year old Pythoner Dec 08 '15 at 16:04
  • Before I remove pulseaudio, is it possible that it could disable any other programs I have on there? Because of my lack of internet access, if I need it for some reason, I won't be able to get it back. – Douglas - 15 year old Pythoner Dec 08 '15 at 16:06