Sound was working, but not anymore

You didn't choose alsa as your sound system when setting up vm did you? If so try shutting down the vm and changing to oss.

jim

No. When I just looked at the properties in the vBox, audio was not enabled at all. I changed it to OSS to see what would happen. Still no luck.

I also tried all of the different alternatives in the Sound System part of the Sound and Multimedia system configuration part of the KDE menu.

Here is some information from the shell:
0000:00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 03)

Well i missed the boat on that one, but it still puzzles me that sound quit after setting up virtual box. Now that you have oss enabled and sound in the vm . The only thing i can think of now is a reboot after running virtual box to see if sound works in it. Just a shot in the dark,thinking having it disabled in vb might have caused a problem some where. Kinda curious if it will work in the vm.

jim

The sound does not work in the vm either. It never did.

Very strange.

Well it appears something is amiss in linux . I have had no success with hardware working in VB when it wont work in linux. Unfortunately we don't have a lot to go on at this point maybe you can fill in some blanks, like what version of Mepis are you running & how long has it been working and are you sure of the circumstances of the failure. Just for the halibut try a music cd with kscd to make sure all sound is kaput. Running the live cd and doing a lsmod and checking your install to see the differences might help. Tough to say at this point. Also comparing a lspci in konsole to see if the hardware seen is the same might help. Still shooting in the dark but one has to start somewhere.

jim

I'll try the live CD when I get back to my place (I'm on the road right now). Thanks for the advice up til now. It's much appreciated.

I am here at this forum due to the same problem. All of a sudden my sound is not there, not from sites on the internet, not from the cd's, not from mp3's. The only known association to the problem I can derive is that shortly before I updated some packages at the Package Manager's prompting. Sorry, but I don't even know what they were. I just selected Mark all Upgrades, then I Applied.

I'm not sure I don't have a hardware problem, as I booted Mepis from the cd to see if sound would work that way. If it had, that would have ruled out the hardware problem, but I got no sound that way either.

I came here following posts about updating meauto, but I couldn't find meauto and then noticed the posts were from 2004 so thought maybe times had changed and demurred on that chase.
jst

taber59602, can you please give us more information on your system? What version of Mepis are you running, and what kind of hardware do you have. Please provide us with as much information as you can on the hardware/soundcard/etc. Then, perhaps we can give you a clue as to what's happening.

Jon

The ability to comfortably use a computer is directly proportional to desire to listen, learn, and experiment, and is inversely proportional to the fear, anger, and stubbornness that you show.

Hi Jon,

Thanks for responding so quickly. I had to wait till I got home from work to respond to your post. Here goes:

I'm running Mepis 6.5.02_32 on a Dell xps T550 (an oldie). It's a Pentium III w/256 mb ram. Here's the sound card info from KinfoCenter:

Sound Driver: 3.8.1a-980706 (ALSA v1.0.14rc3 emulation code)
Kernel: Linux 7e4g2Linux 2.6.15-27-desktop #1 Preempt Sun Mar 11 21:36:14 EDT 2007 i686
Config options: 0

Installed drivers:
Type 10: Alsa emulation

Card config:
SBLive! Value [ct4780] (rev.7, serial:0x80221102) at 0x10a0, irq 10

Audio devices:
0: ADC Capture/Standard PCM Playback (DUPLEX)

Synth Devices:
0:Emul0k1

Midi devices:
0: EMUL0K1 MPU-401 (UART)

Timers:
7: system timer

Mixers:
0: SigmaTel STAC9721,23

Here's what's going on with my system.

top - 17:53:38 up 1 day, 33 min, 1 user, load average: 4.32, 3.27, 2.41
Tasks: 100 total, 2 running, 98 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 62.7% us, 35.0% sy, 0.0% ni, 0.0% id, 0.0% wa, 2.3% hi, 0.0% si
Mem: 255136k total, 235072k used, 20064k free, 3304k buffers
Swap: 1024120k total, 49132k used, 974988k free, 95260k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
18498 root 25 0 2196 1052 852 R 66.9 0.4 0:59.38 top
4190 root 5 -10 67824 11m 2424 S 12.5 4.4 10:39.06 Xorg
31249 neighbor 15 0 28984 13m 11m S 8.9 5.4 0:02.36 konsole
4452 neighbor 17 0 31580 13m 10m S 5.6 5.2 82:47.62 kded
4466 neighbor 15 0 37080 15m 12m S 3.0 6.3 0:59.91 kicker
4508 neighbor 15 0 26464 10m 8836 S 1.0 4.1 0:01.19 klipper
31309 neighbor 16 0 2196 1108 856 R 0.7 0.4 0:00.25 top
17621 neighbor 15 0 164m 56m 37m S 0.3 22.6 0:59.22 soffice.bin
1 root 16 0 1568 528 464 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.58 init
2 root 34 19 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 ksoftirqd/0
3 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 watchdog/0
4 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:01.44 events/0
5 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.04 khelper
6 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kthread
8 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kblockd/0
9 root 20 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kacpid
65 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 khubd
neighbor@2[~]$

Maybe there's something you DON'T see there that's a clue.

The detail of my problem is that everything seems to be working - sound files buffer in Amarok, the little bars that represent volume spike up and down as music is ostensibly played, KsCD appears to all the world to be playing my CD. There's just no sound.
To me it's intuitively a MUTE problem, but I can't see that I've got mute set anywhere. In Kmix all my little green radio lights are lit up green. Green should be good, right?

Hopefully I just don't know every place there is to look.

I appreciate your interest and your help.

Thanks, Jim

jst

Hmmm... Looks like a setting changed somewhere & a couple of things to check came to mind. First is to right click tke kmix speaker icon in the kicker and see if its muted there. Also you might have a look at the select master channel section if kmix while you're there & see if the master channel is still checked & play with a few settings there while playing a cd. I have a via chipset board that has to be set to headphones to get sound from the speakers. A little different implementation on this board of the sound chip i suppose, others i have work with master channel checked.

One other thing is playing with the settings in System Configuration (settings) >sound . Usually on all my rigs OSS is the sound system to use with Virtual Box but that may not always be the case with all chip sets. On this rig sound is autodetect instead of OSS in system configs. So there is no hard and fast rule that enables one to say exactly what settings are going to work for you. In the past for me it was usually OSS in all the settings but this one uses auto detect & OSS in VB. I think you will just have to play with settings to find the right combo.

jim

Well like the subject says I found the source of the problem. I did what you said - some of it I had already done but I did it again just for good measure - still nothing.

So now you're curious about what the problem could have been caused by. I'm sorry to report that someone turned the volume all the way down on my speakers! It gets worse. There are only two of us in the house with opposing thumbs and my wife swears she didn't touch it.

I hesitate to tell you my age because I don't want to be as old as I am and denial is a useful tool for deluding oneself. Nevertheless as a result of my maturity and wisdom, let's say, I've noticed in others a phenomenon I call Geezer Creep. And the only thing I can conclude is that it has struck again. I'm afraid it's true. My wife is getting old and she just doesn't remember turning that volume down.

So, sorry to intrude so needlessly on your busy days. I appreciate that you were there when I thought I needed you.

Jim

PS Please don't tell anyone.

Mums the word! I can sympathize i find myself being one of the over the hill gang too.

Main thing is it now works and you can have a little fun with noise, enjoy!

jim

Thank you Jim (the first one) for being mature, honest, and forthright, and admitting when your wife made a mistake. If more husbands took their responsibilities to heart like you did, there would be a lot... less... (um) marriages? :=)

Great story, and a wonderful reminder to us "software guys" that it's important to BLAME THE HARDWARE occasionally.

Jon

The ability to comfortably use a computer is directly proportional to desire to listen, learn, and experiment, and is inversely proportional to the fear, anger, and stubbornness that you show.

This reminds me of a problem that cropped-up this week, as I have been fighting the good battle in a dual hardware migration scenario that forced itself upon me.

For my part in the matter, I discovered that my SoundBlaster PCI512 card blew itself up as a result of power outage (while I had the outputs routed through an inadvisably direct connection to the home stereo system) induced transients.

"No problem," sez I. "I'll just use the motherboard-integrated sound hardware."

No dice. Nothing has worked for me all week long. Loading and unloading modules, tweaking ALSA and OSS settings, and checking connections.

Until it was epiphany-time, this morning.

I never re-enabled the AC'97 sound hardware through the BIOS config routine.

It seems that I, too, have sound now. {Wish I could blame *that one* on Annie.}

How's my posting?

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