No sound in KDE 4.1.2

[Sensus]

Hello everybody,
I hope this is the right category, don't slap me too hard if not.
Anyway, first post and a support request right at the beginning. I installed KDE 4.1.2 from Portage today, and it worked fine for the most part. However, it produces no sound. I can roule out an alsa/driver issue as playing music with mplayer works just fine. I don't know why sounds don't work in KDE, though. I get no errormessages or such, when its supposed to play a sound just nothing happens.

I compiled media-sound/phonon without gstreamer, i wonder if this is important. As far as i know, gstreamer is the backend that Gnome uses, so i decided not to install it. Has that changed? Does KDE utilise gstreamer vom version 4 onwards?
My laptop has a soundchip that uses the snd_hda_intel driver. The alsa is a kernel-alsa as recommended.
"System Settings -> Notifications -> Player Settings" shows that "Use KDE sound system" is selected wiht 100% volume.

I hope you got some ideas, if you need any further information, please ask.
Thanks in advance.

[WastingBody]

I'm having the same issuse and gstreamer is not the problem seeing as how I have phonon compiled with gstreamer support.

[Atle]

I had and have the same problem.

What I did on one machine was going to Sound System Configuration in the System Settings tool. There were noe devices listed in the right part of the window. Checking the "Show Advanced Devices" checkbox in the bottom left made my HDA NVidia device appear. Now I got sound on that machine.

On my other computer, with an intel sound chip, I tried the same thing. But there the trick does not work.

There is one curious difference that might or might not mean something to someone knowing more about this than I do. On the machine sound doesn't work the device says HDA Intel, AD198x Digital (IEC958 (S/PDIF) Digital Audio Output). On the working machine it says HDA NVidia, AD 198x Analog (Front speakers).

And on the machine that doesn't work, looking at Communication under Audio Capture, the device changes to HDA Intel, AD 198x Analog (Front speakers).

I'm thinking maybe it should say Front Speakers on Audio Output/Music too? If so, how do I configure this?

Hope this information helps.

[Sensus]

Hi Atle, i can't reproduce your steps. Where have you found "Sound System Configuration"? I can't find it in my System settings.

Is media-sound/pulseaudio required? I don't have it installed as it wasn't pulled in as a dependency, i didn't use sets (portage did not know about a set called @kdebase). I installed via kdebase-startkde. As i am not shure what pulseaudio does, i wonder if it is needed for sound playback in KDE4.

[Atle]

Hello again.

I need to mention I am no expert, so I don't know what exactly I am doing.

To find the settings I'm talking about open "System Settings"
Choose "Sound" under "Computer Administration". This open "Sound System Configuration"
Open the "Backend" tab. In my configuration it says "Xine"
Open "Device Preference" tab.
Under the list in the left side of the window check "Show Advanced Devices"

On my system this made the actual device appear. HDA Intel etc.
----
I managed to get my other machine working too. It was a matter of running, as root, alsaconf to create a new /etc/modules.d/alsa file. And then rebooting.

I noticed one difference, previously I had no /dev/dsp. After running alsaconf and rebooting, I have.

I guess you should also add your user to the 'audio' group. Check using the id command.

The other thing about S/PDIF Digital output is still there, so that wasn't the problem.

Hope this helps.

[Sensus]

[Bluespear]

[Atle]

Since I don't know too much about how all these things fit together, I can't give much more help than my own experience shown above. What I can do is confirm that phonon-xine seems to be the correct package for bringing up the config interface I was talking about.

The interface can also be started directly from the command line like this:
kcmshell4 kcm_phonon

[Sensus]

[Atle]

Well, I still have problems.

It looks like amarok is not able to use the sound system if something else has previously used it, and vice versa.

I've not had time to look deeper into which programs affect each other and not. But it seems amarok is the program with the most problems for me. For example will juk play, even when amarok will not. And as far as I can tell, they're both using phonon.

[Bluespear]

Well you have luck because on my side only apps with direct-alsa use can play sound. Amarok fail to play anything (play bar is moving.. but no sound ).
I regret my OSS4 installation. It was so simple.

[cubancigar11]

Hi!

I also just finished emerging all the kde-4.1.2 programs that I use, including amarok. But there is no sound!

I installed phonon without gstreamer flag. Should I enable it?

I also have no "Sound" tab in system settings, would emerging phonon-xine solve this problem?

And lastly, do I need to do both things or just one of these? (emerging phonon-xine)

[Sensus]

[cubancigar11]

Thanks a lot! I have emerged phonon-xine and everything is working fine. There is sound in amarok and I can use mplayer and amarok side by side with no problem.

May be it should be made a dependency...

[Bluespear]

Ok if its still not working : try specifying

[euphi2]

I also had no sound in kde4 applications.
The reason for this was, that 'hald' was not running. Unfortunately there was no error/warning message about this in kcm_phonon or applications like amarok.

I still have the problem that the offered channels like "rear" do not work. However, there are general sound card devices like "Terratec Aureon 7.1 Space #1" and "Terratec Aureon 7.1 Space #2" which in fact use different channels for sound output.

[Atle]

After making sure esound is installed and service started during boot, and esound chosen in sound config as device, I can now play music using amarok and other applications at the same time.