Quote:It's not "super hacky", and it is needed more than you think. Look at all the audio threads, and then look at how many are solved by adding an asound.conf file under /etc. It's a pain, but in a lot of cases it's necessary. Things like this should be a thing of the past when Frodo hits the scene, assuming AE makes it in.
* pumkinut crosses fingers
Yes, it is hacky. On a standalone Ubuntu system, this hasn't been needed since 9.04. I also did not say that it doesn't work for XBMC. But it doesn't work for all programs and browser plugins (I recall it not working for Flash in 9.04). While it's possible that XBMCbuntu is broken in this regard, I highly doubt it.
If the channels are all unmuted and the volume is up, all you should have to do is pick the correct device. If it *still* doesn't play, then try switching the Audio Output type to Analog or Digital (rather than HDMI) and choosing the output device again.
You should be able to get audio out of ALSA via "aplay -l", "alsamixer", and "speaker-test -D plughw:X,Y" without going through PulseAudio. XBMC and Ubuntu use PulseAudio to configure ALSA. You can check pulse by doing "cat /dev/urandom | pacat" (use ctrl-c to quit). If something isn't working you can check the pulse audio configuration from the command line like this:
Code:
$ pacmd list-sinks
# It's a lot of information, to save it to a file to upload to pastebin...
$ pacmd list-sinks > output.txt
HTPC - Core 2 Duo | NVidia ION | 2GB Ram | 80GB HDD | XBMCbuntu 11.0 | Aeon MQ 3
HTPC 2 -
Zotac ZBOX ID41U | 4GB RAM | 60GB SSD | Openelec | Confluence
Server -
unRAID Server | 3 x 2TB WD Green HDD, 1TB WD Black HDD (Cache) | Sabnzbd | CouchPotato | Sickbeard