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Greetings...I hope everyone is having a banner spring!!

Thanks to the community for your help with problems!!

Equipment: Gateway laptop, I-3 processor, 4 Gig RAM....OS: Bionic Puppy 64

I seem to repeatedly have sound problems of two different varieties.

a) Sometimes they are related to Mozilla Firefox, - no sound unless I go to console and type "apulse firefox" and then it works...this is a minor annoyance, but I'd still like to find out why I need to do this...sound seems to work in other browsers etc.

b) A much more serious problem, sound does not work at all. If I go to Alsa Sound Wizard, make sure the sound levels are up on Retrovol and then push the Play Test Sound, nothing happens.
Then I push the Multiple Cards button and I see that there is an ALC272X Analog and Digital, and an HDMI option. When I select the ALC272X Analog, and push the Test Sound button, I get white noise, left and right (the Alsamixer levels are up)

But nothing else works.
I have tried the usual rebooting etc to no avail
I have used this computer for quite a while, and for some reason the sound just quit. I am sure it must be some kind of corrupt driver file or config file or something, but I can't seem to find out what is.
Thanks in advance for your wisdom!!
I had the problem before a couple of times before and ended up loading a new OS to solve it.

Problem a)
If you are using a version of Firefox which requires apulse then the solution is to set things up so apulse is always loaded when you start Firefox. There are various ways to approach this, but using a simple wrapper script as your firefox executable in PATH is one easy method.

Problem b)
If your system has multiple soundcards, one thing that can happen is that the wrong one gets loaded as the default card at boot. This can become something of a random event, sometimes it is the right one, sometimes you get the wrong one. I have found that the best way to lock this down is by adding some options in /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf (or one of the other .conf files in that directory). People may suggest other methods, but I find this the most reliable one. The only thing is you need to know what modules you want to load and figure out which is the correct default. The command cat /proc/asound/modules should give you the information you need, then list them as options with "index=0" to define the desired default.
Your machine may be different, on my machine here I add:-
options snd-hda-intel index=0
options snd-cmipci index=1
options snd-usb-audio index=2
That makes sure that snd-hda-intel (my integrated motherboard soundcard) is always my default so sound always works as expected.

scraginagpup wrote:

Sometimes they are related to Mozilla Firefox, - no sound unless I go to console and type "apulse firefox"

This is because newer Firefox versions require pulseaudio and Bionic64 uses ALSA, so apluse is a program that allows Firefox's pulseaudio requirements to be met and routes the audio through ALSA.

Modify the firefox.desktop file to include the apulse firefox command on the Exec= line or
what I like to do is make a tiny script

#!/bin/sh
apulse firefox

place it as /root/my-applications/bin/start_firefox assign it an icon then drag and drop to the desk top for a shortcut link to quickly start FF.

This is the same method OscarTalks recommended and it works well.

Hi!...Thanks for answering...your reply is interesting and obviously shows an understanding far above mine,
but I will have to go through it one step at a time with you

In console, I typed what you said, Oscartalks - cat /proc/asound/modules, and got:

"0 snd_htl_intel"

When I go to that modules directory, I see further directories:

card0, OSS, seq and a shortcut Mid

The files in that modules directory are:

cards, devices, modules, pcm, timers, version

Contents of the above files:

cards
0 [MID ]: HDA-Intel - HDA Intel MID
HDA Intel MID at 0xf0800000 irq 27

devices
1: : sequencer
2: [ 0- 0]: digital audio playback
3: [ 0- 0]: digital audio capture
4: [ 0- 1]: digital audio playback
5: [ 0- 3]: digital audio playback
6: [ 0] : control
33: : timer

modules
0 snd_hda_intel

pcm
00-00: ALC272X Analog : ALC272X Analog : playback 1 : capture 1
00-01: ALC272X Digital : ALC272X Digital : playback 1
00-03: HDMI 0 : HDMI 0 : playback 1

timers
0: system timer : 3333.333us (10000000 ticks)
P0-0-0: PCM playback 0-0-0 : SLAVE
P0-0-1: PCM capture 0-0-1 : SLAVE
P0-1-0: PCM playback 0-1-0 : SLAVE
P0-3-0: PCM playback 0-3-0 : SLAVE

version
Advanced Linux Sound Architecture Driver Version k4.19.23.

I am sorry, but I have no idea where to go from there!

If the output of cat /proc/asound/modules is what you posted and nothing else, I'm afraid it looks like you only have the one soundcard and my idea for locking down the soundcard order will probably not work in your case, so I don't have any other suggestions. I have several machines with multiple soundcards here and this fix always works, but my output of cat /proc/asound/modules always shows a card 1 and sometimes a card 2 in addition to the card 0 (default). The multiple soundcard wizard is supposed to store configurations for you. This may work if you can figure out the correct setttings and then get them to save. My fix only resolves the issue of multiple soundcards effectively being randomly shuffled on each boot, but my machines have pci soundcards and usb soundcards in addition to the integrated soundcards (because I play around with different audio feeds).
# cat /proc/asound/modules
0 snd_hda_intel
1 snd_cmipci
2 snd_usb_audio
#

Hi folks, I had a sound problem with Bionicpup.No sound at all.This is how I got it fixed.With a little bit of luck, It might work for you too.
(1) Sound WIZARD
On sound wizard you'll see a "repair icon." The last icon at the bottom.
click on it. All your sound cards will be listed.
(2) Select the card you want.
(3) Then click on "TEST SOUND." You should hear a barking noise.
(4) Click on "CONFIGURE."
(5) Press F6 key on keyboard.A small window will come up.
(6) Select your card and ENTER.
Now you'll see a window with sound card details.

At this point I inserted a pen drive with music on it. Left clicked on it to mount it.The songs list appeared and I selected a song and a window appeared on to the
right side.There you have two programs."MPV.player" and "Dead beaf." Select one or the other.Now you should have sound.If you can't hear clearly, click on the speaker icon on the task bar and move the sound slider up.
ENJOY!

Then I push the Multiple Cards button and I see that there is an ALC272X Analog and Digital, and an HDMI option.
When I select the ALC272X Analog, and push the Test Sound button, I get white noise, left and right (the Alsamixer levels are up)

\

Using the sound card wizard.
Analog one is the correct sound card to use.
That needs to be selected as the one to use.
highlight it and click on select card/device.

That sets it as the default sound device to use

Use Retrovol to set volumes
Right click on tray speaker icon
Select full window or mixer.

If you see a setting for PCM
Make sure to select it and turn it up to max volume.
Some Retrovol versions do not have this, some do.
The Retrovol versions, not having PCM setting, automatically set it to full volume, and do not offer a way to change this.

Make sure these changes are saved in the Bionicpup64 save file/folder.
So next time you boot this sound device is used.

Sound in Firefox has already been told what to do.

If you think you are having corrupted or broken file problems.
That can get into a deep rabbit hole of hurting fore cure.
Booting using a fresh new save or a good save backup is best way to fix them.

If you have not done this.

Do a Bionicpup64 update by using Quickpet program (icon on desktop)
quickpet -> Info -> Bionicpup updates
Finish by doing a reboot, updating the save with the changes, and now booted using them.
May have some affect on sound issues.

In my experience, "digital" cards almost always require a special optical-fibre cable, which is then routed out to a D>A (digital to analogue) mixer/converter box. These are being provided more commonly on newer machines for the real audio enthusiasts, of which there seem to be more about nowadays......these guys frequently spend thousands of dollars/pounds on their audio setups, because they take their audio extremely seriously, and like to use lossless formats like .flac (free lossless audio codec).

For normal usage, as m'colleague says, the "analog" card is always the one you should choose.

Mike.