[RESOLVED] No sound in XFCE edition

[letian]

I had a working KDE Mint edition set on my hp-pavilion dm1 laptop with audio working and other stuff pretty normally. I decided to give xfce edition a try and installed from Mint xfce iso keeping the mountpoint of /home and all the files in place, except for KDE, gnome config files as well as other rubbish that I cleaned so that it would not mess with the new installation. Right after the first boot was initiated I got into the default desktop. All seemed fine, but I've noticed that there was no volume applet present in the tray (though it definitely should be there). I had sound working, but I needed to have an applet so that I could volume up and down whenever I need.
The only available "out-of-the-box" was xfce4-mixer, which could be added to the panel (why was it not added by default in the first place I wonder?). I didn't like the way xfce4-mixer looks and I always use volumeicon. So I downloaded volumeicon-mixer from the rep, but it refused to start up. I went with source volumeicon archive and after installing the deps I installed it and it crashed with the same result. I decided to use some alsa based applets and installed alsa-base and tools. I really don't know at what step, but the sounds disappeared.
When I run clementine I can see the equalizer and scrollbar moving but I do not have sound. I have tried mingling with pavucontrol, alsamixer, xfce4-mixer channels and audio cards, I tried xfce4-settings-manager, uninstalling pulse, uninstalling alsa, back and forth, but nothing changed this behaviour. So I wasted like two hours to get this stuff working, wondering why on earth is linux still so overwhelmingly bad with audio.

None of the forum threads worked for me. I have two audio cards as any laptop user. True audio card and HDMI ati blabla that I always disable if something of this sort happens. I need some debugging help or just an opinion on what can cause such behaviour. I had pulse and alsa perfectly running side by side on more than 2 other distros, though it was a different machine.

[cwsnyder]

This is my opinion, and it may not be very informed. I am always reluctant on a Pulse-Audio based system to add a ALSA based controller without removing any previous ALSA controls. I am also reluctant, because of past experiences with audio problems, to add any sound controls not included in the repositories, as I know I am pretty much on my own in integrating my existing hardware and software with the 'new' software.

First, did you remove all settings folders for volumeicon before installing alsa-base?

Did you consider changing your icon theme before throwing out xfce4-mixer?

Have you gone to the command-line and checked settings with alsamixer to see if any of the outputs were muted?

Since Clementine is not the default installed as the sound player, did you try mplayer or whatever was the default for the Xfce installation?

Are all sounds gone, or only playback of particular types of music files (ie. .mp3, ogg vorbis, flac, wav)?

[Flemur]

What cwsnyder said - also delete your ~/.pulse directory.

Try "$ speaker-test -c 2" for testing; if that works (makes white-noise, etc., alternates channels), check the output selection on whatever sound player you're using.
And here's some good stuff:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Advanced_Linux_Sound_Architecture#Unmuting_the_channels

[letian]

I dropped the idea of trying to solve this, since I installed xfce and mounted /home partition with .*|.config files from previous KDE installation. Don't do this. So, I created a separate partition with my /home data and just reinstalled MInt xfce on to clean /|/home system. Everything works ok now.
Thank you guys, I shall follow your advises if I bump into this kind of trouble again.