[Solved] Firefox support for ALSA audio _input_

[szatox]

I still don't know, for example, how to get a 24bit/96kHz audio stream from Qobuz to my DAC, without it being downsampled by Pulse.

I don't know either, and it might not even be possible, since professional audio is not their focus.
It should work with jack and pipewire though. I won't tell you how to do that, because it's not my focus either, but I think I read something about that in either PW's FAQ or it's design documentation, so there's a good chance PA simply wasn't a suitable tool for the task.

As for application development, yeah, I fully understand why it's a drain on resources, to support multiple audio frameworks. But here's the thing: if you support ALSA, you support everything else as well, because there are ALSA plug-ins to adapt to everything else

Yes, this is great. Pretty much none of the apps I use support jack, yet the whole audio setup work just fine. Very convenient.

[RIA77]

Hi folks

I'm aware that Firefox doesn't want to support direct ALSA audio. But, building with "USE=alsa -pulsaudio..." does result in something that works -- at least for playback.

But I get no audio _input_ which, of course, is essential for Zoom, etc. It's not that I get an error message -- it's just as if the audio input is muted, or its recording from a different source.

I find that 'arecord xxx' works fine, either with the default device or if I set the specific ALSA device. I've gone to alsamixer and turned all the volume sliders up to maximum, but it makes no difference.

Given firefox's general lack of support for ALSA, I'm not entirely surprised that it doesn't work. But has anybody else tried it?

I thought I had identified all the show-stoppers that would prevent me adopting ALSA as my day-to-day platform, but I hadn't thought about this one. If I can't run Zoom, I've have to go back to Fedora :/

I'm willing to try a different browser but (for different reasons) neither Chromium nor Google Chome will install.

BR, Lars.

It works with pure alsa.
I used firefox with alsa.
Just put "alsa" in make conf, and adjust your soundcard.

Code: Select all

Find your desired card with:

   cat /proc/asound/cards
and then create /etc/asound.conf with following:

	   defaults.pcm.card 1
	   defaults.ctl.card 1

Emerge volumeicon.

And it just works.

[lars_the_bear]

.
And it just works.

I'm sorry to report that it didn't just work for me. The 'alsa' build of Firefox would do output, and not input. And it didn't respect ALSA defaults for either input or output -- it always output to 'card 0'. There's an environment variable with a name something like ALSA_PCM_CARD that does work -- but only for output.

Maybe other releases of Firefox behave better?

But apulse does seem to work, both for output and input. I haven't tried it on Gentoo yet, because my Firefox build doesn't have any Pulse support. But I tried it on an Ubuntu system that I purged Pulse from, and it worked fine.

So probably what I need to do is to (sigh) build Firefox with Pulse support, and use apulse with it. But I guess there might be a binary version of this somewhere that I could use, and avoid another two days of compiling.

Still, I am annoyed (at Firefox, not Gentoo) because I am trying to solve a problem that has absolutely no reason to exist. The Firefox maintainers should hang their heads in shame.

BR, Lars.

[Chiitoo]

So probably what I need to do is to (sigh) build Firefox with Pulse support, and use apulse with it. But I guess there might be a binary version of this somewhere that I could use, and avoid another two days of compiling.

Did you try running the ALSA-only build via apulse yet?

Also are there any ALSA related messages when running Firefox via a terminal emulator, and then running the web application of interest?

I suppose I can try building it today myself.

[lars_the_bear]

Did you try running the ALSA-only build via apulse yet?

Not so far, to be honest -- I just assumed it wouldn't work without Pulse support.

It won't take me long to try -- I just haven't gotten around to it yet.

BR, Lars.

[Chiitoo]

I gave it a spin, and with USE="-pulseaudio" playback indeed works with or without apulse, but recording does not.

I can change the playback device via '.asoundrc' but it really does not seem to care what I set as a capture device (even if non-existent, there are no error messages produced).

With USE="pulseaudio" (and apulse built with USE="sdk" so no need for media-libs/libpulse and friends), I start seeing the same errors as with www-client/firefox-bin, so I think that could potentially work if given suitable configuration to it.

[lars_the_bear]

I gave it a spin, and with USE="-pulseaudio" playback indeed works with or without apulse, but recording does not.

I can change the playback device via '.asoundrc' but it really does not seem to care what I set as a capture device (even if non-existent, there are no error messages produced).

That's essentially what I saw. Thank you for confirming that I'm not just losing my marbles.

I tried Bluetooth-enabled Firefox with apulse on Ubuntu (stripped of Pulse) and it works fine. I'm reasonably confident that it will work on Gentoo, but trying it hasn't come to the top of my to-do list just yet.

BR, Lars.

[powerman]

With USE="pulseaudio" (and apulse built with USE="sdk" so no need for media-libs/libpulse and friends), I start seeing the same errors as with www-client/firefox-bin, so I think that could potentially work if given suitable configuration to it.

Not sure is this because of valid ALSA configuration or because of newer firefox version but for me both firefox-bin (as is) and firefox (with USE="pulseaudio" and apulse built with USE="sdk") works just fine with microphone! I'm starting just `firefox`, not `apulse firefox`.

Anyway, thanks a lot of the hints about these USE flags in this thread!