TweetDeck not playing audio properly in LMDE 64-bit [Solved]

[karashata]

I'm not 100% sure, but I believe this could also be a problem for other Adobe AIR applications...

I use a Twitter client called TweetDeck which requires Adobe AIR. Since there is no 64-bit AIR package available anywhere, I'm stuck installing the 32-bit version that's available and the 32-bit libraries for Debian in order to make it run. This all typically goes without a hitch (though I do also have to manually extract the 32-bit gnome-keyring libraries in order for TweetDeck to be able to securely save account passwords... Another issue entirely though...).

My issue is this: Audio does not work properly with TweetDeck. If no other applications are playing audio, TweetDeck will play its own sounds fine, however it will completely block any other applications from playing audio until it's closed. However, if any other application is already playing audio, TweetDeck will not play audio at all until that application is stopped. A little bit of searching leads me to believe that this may be because TweetDeck is trying to use ALSA directly and is therefore either blocking or being blocked by any other audio stream. I've checked /etc/asound.conf and it's all set to use PulseAudio, so I'm sort of stumped.

If anyone has had issues like this with TweetDeck or any other AIR application, and knows of a way to make it work, I'd really like to know. Other than the sound, everything else works fine, but it would be nice to have that audible notification when I receive new tweets...

[remoulder]

Try starting the application with pasuspender before the name, i.e. pasuspender tweetdeck. What this is meant to do is suspend pulseaudio whilst that application is active.

[karashata]

Er... If you mean to start TweetDeck with pasuspender, all that does is stop everything else from playing sound, which is not what I want to do. If you mean to start any other applications that may play sound (like my media player) with pasuspender, I'm not sure that would help either. What I want is for TweetDeck to be able to play sound simultaneously with everything else that's playing audio, similar to how it works in the Ubuntu-based Mint distribution.

Thanks for the attempt at help though, it's appreciated.

If anyone knows of a way to make this work the same as it does in the Ubuntu base (ie. properly), please let me know!

[karashata]

I figured out how to fix the problem. Turns out that the 32-bit libraries don't include the ALSA plugins, so 32-bit applications using ALSA can't use PulseAudio correctly. Downloading the i386 version of libasound2-plugins and manually extracting the contents of /usr/lib from the .deb archive to /usr/lib32 on the system installed the 32-bit plugins, allowing the applications to use PulseAudio properly.