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Hi,
I've looked at huge numbers of threads and posts before even registering but nothing gets me very far.
I have a revo 3700 running 12.04 with XBMC eden
As per the other sound related post on the 1st page
1) audio is not muted in alsamixer.
2) audio works fine in VLC with same files - Well it did until I removed Pulseaudio reading that somewhere would help
3)menu sounds in XBMC works fine - again did until I removed Pulseaudio
4) When playing videos I can get downmixed audio from Pulse audio as the audio output if I deselect the AC3/DTS buttons, this is by selecting Pulseaudio as the output device but nothing through the passthrough
6) i have a reciever and it supports ac3 and dts
I'll happily post anything people want to look at in order, I've tried the most things, custom audio devices editing my asound files..
Anyone have any ideas?
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Provide the output of the following:
aplay -L
aplay -l
/etc/asound.conf (if exists)
~/.asoundrc
Also what version of the nvidia drivers are you using? Run 'dmesg | grep NVIDIA' and that should tell you.
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Have you tried he various custom hardware settings without asound files? I don't remember the exact syntax off-hand, but it's going to be some combination of plughw or hw and the card and device numbers for the nvidia in aplay -l. I think it will be something like hw:1,3 or hw:1,7 or hw:1,9.
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It would be really helpful if people who understood how these sound configurations worked would write a tutorial for the rest of us. People often throw out different values without explanation, and I am just lucky enough to guess the right stuff on occasion. I have no idea what the difference between plughw and hw is for instance.
I currently have two systems running, one has PulseAudio, and since I have sound for videos working I don't want to mess with it, I'm just living without the menu audio which doesn't bother me. The other is a Zotac box with specs similar to yours. I put XBMCbuntu on it so it doesn't have PulseAudio. I've been fortunate enough to find other people with similar configurations to mine that have it working with the optical output. I got XBMC and squeezeslave working together thanks to an asound.conf file I found here, but I don't know why it works and why it didn't before. It lacks menu sounds also, which I just find odd. Likewise I don't know the difference between the two audio devices that have to be set in XBMC and I've never seen a thorough explanation of the two. It's all very frustrating.
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Well I understand your point about there being too many devices, but just an analysis of one device, which commands you run, which part of the output you examine to feed to the next command, why you use plughw or hw, what a sink is, what is pulseaudio, how should it be used or should it be removed or could it be bypassed, etc. In many different cases I've seen people say "use plughw instead of hw", but never once why you would use that. It seems like most people are just stumbling around in the dark and hoping to make it work, without ever knowing why it works. Most of the time when I see people with the kind of problem adam81 had people just throw out a string to try in the custom audio, and never say why so other people could use that as a guide for their own audio setup.
As for the two devices, how do you determine which is working and when? I usually use pass-through, I assume, since my receiver does the processing. But I think if I change Audio Device it doesn't work at all. And then where's the menu audio going? That's completely different.
I've been using PC's since the 80's, and Linux since probably around 2000, and I find audio on Linux to be one of the worst things ever to work with. It's so damn cryptic and very touchy. I'm under the impression that I'd be better off without PulseAudio, but I'm scared to remove it because it will probably kill my working settings. I really do the AudioEngine stuff takes care of this nightmare.
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See my edit for plughw vs. hw. Generally, you want plughw because it enables the ALSA plugin layer.
HDMI connections require a handshake. If audio isn't enabled at the time of the handshake, the other device (the receiver) may disable audio until another handshake is executed. I believe this happens when you begin playing music or videos since the context changes (PCM vs. passthrough), but someone may need to correct me there.
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Hi I don't profess to understand most of what I have read here so please be gentle. I have pretty much the same issue as adam81. I'm running ASRock H67M-ITX, 4GB Ram, A Radeon 6450 Graphics card Intel i3 2100 processor with Eden 11.0 I have HDMI connected to the graphics card and an optical Toshlink out for sound. Analog sound works fine using the generic driver. HDMI video works fine. The digital outputs give me nothing.
I have tried:
- plughw: 1,3 for both audio output and passthrough under the custom setting
- alsmixer settings all unmuted including SPDIF
- changing different sound drivers
With the above I get "Failure to initialize audio device" error
My aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 0: ALC892 Analog [ALC892 Analog]
Subdevices: 0/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH],device 1: ALC892 Digital [ALC892 Digital]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 2: Generic [HD Audio Generic], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
I'd post the aplay -L but not sure stop the screen scroll or how to copy the text.
Any help you chaps can off would be greatly recieved.
Thx in adavance.
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Chainsawdave, it looks like you need to use card 2, thus plughw:2,3. But I'm not sure if you got drivers loaded right since it's says Generic there. You need to look into the ATI threads for help with this. NVidia and ATI are two completely different beasts.
To get the output for something that scrolls by too fast just dump it to a text file then open it in an editor. Do the following:
aplay -L > output.txt