Sound cuts out on youtube, flash sometimes

[Vandal73]

How do you keep programs in Linux Mint from hi-jacking the sound driver? In Windows I can run multiple programs producing sound at once but it seems if I'm playing a flash or YouTube video and another program with sound loads, I lose the sound in the browser (usually Chrome here). I have to then close the browser and re-launch to get it back.

[slider]

How do you keep programs in Linux Mint from hi-jacking the sound driver?

You should not be having this problem. Your Linux install should perform multiple sound tasks as well.

Check to see if you are have pulseaudio and alsa installed.

If you have them both you can try disabling pulseaudio and then make a test play of your sound devices.

[Vandal73]

I removed Pulse audio packages after your advice and reading threads on the Ubuntu forums about it. They stated Pulse is newer, runs on top of Alsa and most seemed to like Alsa better. After I removed the Pulse packages I set the Alsa to re-install. I then rebooted.

I couldn't load because something reset my grub menu.lst entry back to /dev/sda1 instead of the UUID it apparently needs. I fixed that but now, X-windows shows a grey color on the taskbar at login and after login, all I get in x-windows is a black screen with a small terminal window: no taskbar, no colors, no wallpapers, no icons, nothing. What do I need to do fix x-windows?

[Vandal73]

I reinstalled pulseaudio from command line and rebooted but x-windows still won't display anything but this "safe mode" of a black screen with 1 small terminal window on it.

[frank392]

check out if you have vlc player and mplayer for firefox, you should only have one

[slider]

Please don't panic.

None of this should have happened to you. I believe that a few other things were removed along with pulseaudio by accident. It is very common to disable or remove pulseaudio due to conflicts with alsa and piping and should not cause any problems with xserver or any window displaying capabilitiy.

By what process did you remove pulseaudio?

A system does not require pulseaudio to run so something else was uninstalled along with it apparently. ???

I've removed it many times will working on my own and other users PC's when needed. Alsa is older and usually far more stable, at least thats been my experience.

Try this simple step first:
Restart your PC > when you get to the Grub menu choose "start Linux Mint in compatibilty mode" > then choose to fix or reconfigure x.

If you have further problems please post and we'll try it a different way.

[Vandal73]

OMG I wish I had re-read this thread, Regardless I burnt a CD of LM8 x64 and reinstalled but kept my existing partitions and did NOT format. I'm back in X-windows now! YEAH! But, no sound.

To answer your question, I removed the packages from package manager.

For my current situation, I ran "aplay -l" and it says no sound card... but lspci shows it; on board Intel HDMI. It looks like both Alsa and Pulse are installed both from package manager and available programs I have on my menus. How do I get my sound card detected?

You're right of course, something was removed that X-windows needed and I've learned a lesson about removing OS installed packages, even if they appear to not be required. I've never seen an option on my grub menu as you mentioned although, after this recent install my menu has gone from a mint greent background to a basic black with white menu entries (is this Grub2?).

How can I get LM8 to re-scane or recognize my sound card? It worked before so I know it's possible and yes, my sound is not muted.

Frank, to answer your question, I have both and several other media players installed but I had them in the past as well and the system worked, sometimes. I'll check the browser plugins and remove one.

[Vandal73]

Actually, I see three audio devices on-board now, I may have never noticed the first if everything was running fine:

00:14.2 Audio device: ATI... SBx00 Azailia (Intel HDA)
01:00.1 Audio device: ATI... HD48x0 audio
02:00.1 Audio device: ATI...HD48x0 audio

I have 2 ATI 4830 video cards, are the last two audio chips / connections from the cards? I have nothing attached for audio directly to them, I haven't changed any hardware cabling through out this.

I see I have a kernel module for snd-hda-intel in /lib/modules/2.6.31-14-generic/kernel/sound/pci/hda/snd-hda-intel.ko but if I run a modprobe for it I get:
FATAL: Module snd-hda-intel not found.

[Vandal73]

UPDATE: I installed all of the alsa packages (apt-get install alsa-*) and then the snd-hda-intel module showed up on a modprobe so I installed it: (sudo modprobe snd-hda-intel) and rebooted (NOTE: I heard the speakers make a "tick" noise as it was rebooting).

I see hda-intel sound devices now under control center - sounds - outputs but STILL have no sound.

[slider]

Originally I asked you to just disable pulseaudio, not remove it, but removal shouldn't cause these problems. This may be a Gnome difference, I'm just not sure.

If you would have run asoundconf unset-pulseaudio (This could have been also accomplished by changing the file to a state where it is not usable by the system or just moving it temporarily.) I think you would have been ok maybe. I'm sorry, I took it for granted that you knew to disable it. Still removal shouldn't effect all of the other things that happened. Again it must be Gnome specific problem. Its always important to check and see what all is going to be removed by a process before removing anything. We've all made that mistake before so don't feel bad ok. As versions are getting newer (grub, distros) it is becoming somewhat unpredictable and very hard when trying to help users.

Also it seems to be dependent on which app is having problems with pulseaudio. See Here Some problems are easily fixed by removing it with certain apps and the outcome is hard to predict due to the large multitude of systems and configurations out there.

Starting the offending app in the terminal will usually provide some output for debugging so please keep that in mind for next time. Syslog, dmesg, all are there in order to help you when things go awry.


What to advise you next??? Hmm... In the future please move a little slower and do more research before you proceed with any plan, as once some things are done it can become very hard to try and fix.

Run

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lsmod | grep snd

to see all modules that are connected to sound.

You may want to try

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asoundconf unset-pulseaudio

if you have it installed again then restart your PC to make sure old stuff gets flushed out.

Please take a look at man asoundconf in terminal. Give it a good read.

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inxi-f

will show you the current sound card being used as well.

When things get mixed up like this you may need to purge the (Please do not do this yet) involved packages and then re-install them. Purging removes the configuration files as well.

I'm not sure what to advise you because I do not know where you are at with this really?

Research well then act. Move slower, be precise as possible with plenty of patience.

With so many different systems out there, it is insurmountable to make every one of them work out of the box. This does not even take into consideration of kernel upgrades, distro changes, DE changes, whatnot, that add to the problem as well!

The Dev's have their work cut out for them. I guess we all do in reality.