Monday 11 May 2009

Ubuntu 9.04 Sound Problems

I upgraded my Fujitsu-Siemens laptop to Ubuntu 9.04 from 8.10 a few days ago.
Everything worked fine except for sound. Sound went from working perfectly in 8.10 to being quiet, and awfully crackly in 9.04.
If I updated the gnome settings to use OSS rather than ALSA it worked ok, except flash movies still made crackly noises (I don't think flash can use OSS).
I messed about with the gnome mixer without luck, except I did notice that changing the PCM volume did nothing (which is wrong), but changing the 'beep' volume did alter the sound volume (Along with crackles).
I don't know why the beep and PCM are the wrong way around, and don't have time to work out how sound works properly, so I went for brute force and ignorance - I had heard a suggestion that Pulseaudio might be the problem, so I replaced pulseaudio with esound, and it all seems to work now...
Therefore, I don't know what the problem was, but it was cured by getting rid of pulseaudio...

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great post...

windows 7 sound problems said...

Sometimes problem with sounds is because of the compatibility matter. The driver used by the soundcard with an older operating system does not seem to be compatible with the new operating system. It is better to contact a computer network solution to do troubleshooting with regards to sounds.

Graham Jones said...

Thanks for your comments. I think this is out of date now though. My problems went away with more recent Ubuntu releases where pulseaudio works ok.