How to troubleshoot sound problems

Hi! This page exists to help you make your sound working and to help us prevent others from spotting your problems.

Use the list below to identify the component that is making your sound not working and to aid you providing the debugging information when you file a bug report. Please add output of relevant commands to the report:

1. Add shorter texts, such as getfacl output or fact that aplay did not play sound as comments 1. Attach longer outputs, such as pulseaudio -vvv log as attachments

Feel free to improve this text to reflect your experience, or mail suggestions to lkundrak@redhat.com. Thanks!

ALSA

• Relevant pacakges: kernel, alsa-lib, alsa-plugins-pulseaudio
• Permissions on device files are managed by HAL
  • Relevant pacakges: hal, hal-libs
  • See what ACLs are set with getfacl /dev/snd/pcmC0D0c
    • Users with active sessions should have write privilege
      • Relevant pacakges: ConsoleKit, ConsoleKit-libs
      • Check which sessions are active with ck-list-sessions
• Pulseaudio backend is in package alsa-plugins-pulseaudio
• Volume settings are adjusted with alsamixer -c 0
• You can play sound with aplay -D hw:0 /usr/share/sounds/startup3.wav
  • When pulseaudio is running, use pasuspender /usr/bin/aplay -- -D hw:0 /usr/share/sounds/startup3.wav

PulseAudio daemon

• Relevant packages: pulseaudio
• Starts with the session
  • In GNOME see System->Preferences->Personal->Sessions
  • In KDE, you should have kde-settings-pulseaudio installed
  • Check if it runs with ps aux |grep pulseaudio
• grep pulseaudio /var/log/messages to see if it had any problems
• Audio devices are discovered by HAL
  • Relevant pacakges: hal, hal-libs
  • Use hal-find-by-capability --capability alsa to list them
• Run verbose pulseaudio on foreground to see detailed messages
• Kill running pulseaudio pulseaudio -k or pkill -KILL pulseaudio
• Clean up the leftover temporary files rm -rf /tmp/pulse-*
• Run pulseaudio -vvv
• You can play sound with paplay /usr/share/sounds/startup3.wav

GStreamer

• Relevant packages: gstreamer, gstreamer-plugins-pulse
• Default sound devices is set by gnome-sound-properties
• Either ALSA or pulse should work. Also default.
• Check the values with gconftool-2 --recursive-list /system/gstreamer/0.10/default
• You can play sound with gst-launch audiotestsrc \! autoaudiosink
• Also try pulsesink instead