pulseaudio, analog sound output, and WHAT?

[Michael]

Thank you so much for that.

On Fri, Nov 20, 2020 at 11:13 AM Eric Oyen via PLUG-discuss <
plug-discuss at 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 at 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.
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-- 
:-)~MIKE~(-:
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