Sound no longer working

Okay, have had this before and couldn't fix it - I reloaded instead. I have now had it happen again, this time on Hardy, and I don't have a recent backup. I recall others having had this happen but searches aren't bringing me any useful results. The last time this occurred I still had analog output if I used headphones but digital was cooked, I've not got headphones handy but ASSume this is much the same.

Scenario was this - went to watch a movie, menu came up, selected Play Movie, and XBMC crashed to desktop. Mouse was unresponsive, I rebooted via SSH. When XBMC was run again no audio. Play something in mPlayer and I'm not hearing audio there either. Menu sounds etc. all dead in XBMC. Digital output is *not* muted and volume is up. I *know* others have seen this and solved it but danged if I can find those posts, I'd appreciate a hand. Thanks!

I've had this where only digital audio would output and NOT analog (still out of spdif).

What I usually do to fix in my scenario is:

0) Stop XBMC
1) Create a file in your home directory called .asoundrc that contains the following single line: pcm.!default spdif
2) Run: speaker-test -c 2
3) If you hear sound, you can stop.
4) Remove .asoundrc
5) Restart XBMC


Try that...

Okay, let me tell you what I did and see if I've understood correctly...

1) In my home/blkmgk/ folder I created a folder named .asoundrc - like you I do not normally have this.
2) In .asoundrc I created an empty file and named it pcm.!default spdif
3) Ran the speaker test - no sound

I am using coaxial digital output if that matters. It almost seems like there's a corrupted file or something somewhere. The last time this happened I updated ALSA and tried to remove\reinstall it to no avail. Would love to track this issue down!

Nono..

Create a FILE called .asoundrc in your home directory with the following contents in the .asoundrc file:

pcm.!default spdif

Fixed!!! Thank you VERY much!

You're welcome... Don't forget to remove the .asoundrc AFTER running speaker-test. It causes issues otherwise

When I tried the .asound method it cause me nothing but issues so I hunted around till I found this:

/usr/bin/iecset audio on

Fixes it every time for me. I experienced the problem daily as I have a script run by irexec to kill xbmc and run myth and vice versa. Every time you kill something with Digital Audio you lose PCM on my machine. The above line in the script before restarting xbmc/myth fixed all my issues.

Cheers,

Arkay

I tried that iecset as well but it did not fix it for me.

Another thing that works *most* of the time but not as reliably as the asoundrc method is:

cat /dev/urandom | ac3dec -R

I have both run when starting XBMC just to be sure

Gotta love HTPC consistency

Cheers,

Arkay.

More like a dumb ALSA bug that has existed for a few years apparently.