Thank you so much for that. On Fri, Nov 20, 2020 at 11:13 AM Eric Oyen via PLUG-discuss < plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> wrote: > Oh joy! > > I really wish the developers had not taken this route with pulse audio. > Because of this, I have had no end of issues when trying to output screen > reader audio to my headphones using a standard stereo audio output. My > machine has SpDIF and HDMI outputs as well as analog, yet I have not been > able to get analog working with any degree of functionality. I literally > have to ssh into that machine and run console based programs because I > can’t interact with that machine directly. > > Thanks for the info on where to locate good example programs. Btw, the > machine in question is my RaspberryPi 3 that I was trying to setup for the > seeing with sound project. > > -Eric > From the Central Offices of the Technomage Guild, Technical difficulties > resolution Dept. > > > > On Nov 20, 2020, at 7:58 AM, Matt Graham via PLUG-discuss < > plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> wrote: > > > > The firefox developers have basically said, "The microphone on your > computer won't work at all unless you use pulseaudio."[0] I've been trying > to avoid pulseaudio for various reasons.[1] But since Thanksgiving is > canceled this year, I'll have to see the family virtually, and why not do > that with bigbluebutton.org ? This led me to a twisty maze of > unwarranted assumptions and outright stupidity, which I will try to > summarize below. TL;DR: pulseaudio hates analog audio and making analog > audio work properly requires editing config files by hand. > > > > I first tried building pulseaudio and firefox with the pulseaudio USE > flag on my laptop. This worked almost perfectly. I expected this to work > basically identically on my desktop, because both machines use sound cards > that are driven by the snd_hda_intel module. Nope! > > > > pulseaudio has a strong preference for digital audio. Its autodetection > will select the first digital device it finds as the default audio output. > For me, this was the HDMI output... which is hooked up to the TV, which is > almost never on. My actual sound card was also found, but it wasn't the > default output, and it was set to output sound to the iec-958-stereo-output > (S/PDIF jack). I do not have anything plugged in to that. Setting the > default output to the analog sound card didn't work; pulseaudio refused to > write any data to the analog card. > > > > I found a solution at > https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio/Examples , link > "Simultaneous HDMI and analog output". If a digital device exists, > pulseaudio refuses to send data to analog devices unless it can *also* send > data to a digital device. This makes no sense. I have no idea how > ordinary users would deal with this problem. The solution was to put the > lines: > > > > # make pulseaudio work with analog and digital things at > > # the same time. Load analog device (NOTE: use aplay -l > > # to find the hw: numbers for the device you need, they > > # will be displayed as "card X: (name) device Y: and you > > # need to put those numbers in there. X and Y for me > > # were both 0 because my analog card's first on the > > # PCI bus. YMMV.) > > load-module module-alsa-sink device=hw:X,Y > > load-module module-combine-sink sink_name=combined > > set-default-sink combined > > > > ...up at the top of the /etc/pulse/default.pa file. I have no idea how > Mint/Ubuntu et al would handle this for ordinary users. There is no way to > do any of this with the slightly more user-friendly pavucontrol[2]. I've > had these speakers for 21 years, which may be a bit unusual, but are people > really abandoning analog sound? Regardless, I'm leaving this here in the > hopes that some crawler will find it and some search engine will lead > someone to a quicker fix than the multiple-hour @#%^ing around I had to do. > > > > [0] "Select the audio input and output devices that exist and put them > into 2 lists, have user choose speaker/mike from those 2 lists" is > apparently much more difficult with ALSA than with pulseaudio or whatever > OS X/Doze provides. Or the firefox developers are lazy and clueless. > > > > [1] Poettering, nuff said. > > > > [2] Our UX experts have determined that the best way to deal is to > pretend we're a phone! So the menubar doesn't act like a menubar acts in > real applications! Isn't that edgy and disruptive? > > > > -- > > Crow202 Blog: http://crow202.org/wordpress > > There is no Darkness in Eternity > > But only Light too dim for us to see. > > --------------------------------------------------- > > PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org > > To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: > > https://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss > > --------------------------------------------------- > PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org > To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: > https://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss -- :-)~MIKE~(-: