Grub Rescue

Wonderful! I just discovered that XBMC is not the only thing without audio, everything is. After attempting to play an audio file in Amarok, when that failed, I cross-checked in VLC, and it is mute also. I then checked in Phonon, and there are now 3 devices are listed, instead of the two as when the audio worked, but the first one is grayed out, pretty much like it was in the old installation of Kubuntu. None of them produce any sound using the test button.

Since I haven't made any hardware changes...other than disconnecting the optical drives, which shouldn't have anything to do with this, and I haven't made any changes related to the sound card or it's drivers, the only thing that I can think of that might be a causal factor is the running of XBMC. I only say that, because that is when I first became aware of any audio problem.

It is these kind of things that have discouraged me in the past, because I'm not qualified to deal with them on my own.

seekermeister said:

Wonderful! just discovered that XBMC is not the only thing without audio, everything is. After attempting to play an audio file in Amarok, when that failed, I cross-checked in VLC, and not it is mute also. I then checked in Phonon, and there is now 3 devices listed, instead of the two when the audio worked, but the first one is grayed out, pretty much like it was in the old installation of Kubuntu.

Since I haven't made any hardware changes...other than disconnecting the optical drives, which shouldn't have anything to do with this, and I haven't made any changes related to the sound card or it's drivers, the only thing that I can think of that might be a causal factor is the running of XBMC. I only say that, because that is when I first became aware of any audio problem.

It is these kind of things that have discouraged me in the past, because I'm not qualified to deal with them on my own.

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Now that is odd, did you try the audio settings?
It can be found by right clicking the volume mixer and clicking on audio setup.
From there you can set what device you want to be the primary and shift them around using the prefer/defer buttons.
We could see what is happening, its very strange that this is happening

Just checked, but the only thing I found there was that the audio output was set to the HDMI device, so I reset it to the analog one instead. The audio setup option produced exactly the same Window as when I went to Phonom, where none of the devices listed test out as having audio available. That grayed out device is the analog device. There is a duplicate of it that isn't grayed out, but it doesn't work either. To me, that ghost device appears to indicate that something tampered with the audio, and I don't think it was me.

seekermeister said:

Just checked, but the only thing I found there was that the audio output was set to the HDMI device, so I reset it to the analog one instead. The audio setup option produced exactly the same Window as when I went to Phonom, where none of the devices listed test out as having audio available. That grayed out device is the analog device. There is a duplicate of it that isn't grayed out, but it doesn't work either. To me, that ghost device appears to indicate that something tampered with the audio, and I don't think it was me.

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Very bizarre, how about you try a restart and see what happens.
Its a start to see if this will happen again

Okay, but in the mean time let me say that I also just checked in the mixer's audio hardware setup tab, and used the speaker test buttons, and they did produce audio, although there were only two, left and right, which is less than it should be on my 5.1 system.

Rebooting was no help.

seekermeister said:

Rebooting was no help.

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I had to check, hmm I am a bit stumped to see what is going on here.
I mean if you can get audio via another method okay but I am unsure why the card stops being detected.
I had a similar issue myself in the past and one way I solved it was by just simply restarting my computer which did not work for you.
How about you try a kde reset by removing the hidden .kde folder again?
I dont have the same soundcard as you do so I can only give possible suggestions.
But opening up to apps like that should not cause this kind of issue, unless pulseaudio is giving you issues.
Which is possible, pulseaudio (one of the methods on how linux gets sound) can be flaky in KDE.

I forgot how you said to delete it, all that I can remember is something about a key combination using the . key. Going back to the line of thought you were on with the old installation's audio problems, you thought that installing the C-Media audio driver might help...do you think it might now? If so, would you point me to it? Would the current driver have to be uninstalled first, like in Windows?

You have to forgive my references to Windows, but that is how my mind works. With this kind of problem there, I would first delete the device in the Device Manager, and if that failed uninstall the driver and re-install it. Anything like that here?

Just did the KDE reset and there is still no audio.

One good thing that the KDE reset did, was that it put a taskbar on my secondary monitor at the bottom as it should have.

seekermeister said:

I forgot how you said to delete it, all that I can remember is something about a key combination using the . key. Going back to the line of thought you were on with the old installation's audio problems, you thought that installing the C-Media audio driver might help...do you think it might now? If so, would you point me to it? Would the current driver have to be uninstalled first, like in Windows?

You have to forgive my references to Windows, but that is how my mind works. With this kind of problem there, I would first delete the device in the Device Manager, and if that failed uninstall the driver and re-install it. Anything like that here?

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No installing/removing drivers would no nothing, if there is a audio issue it may be pulseaudio related.
try copy/pasting this command in a terminal:
rm -r ~/.config/pulse; pulseaudio -k

and log out/log in again

That may solve your issue as pulseaudio's config can be corrupted every so often.
Its a drawback to pulse.

seekermeister said:

One good thing that the KDE reset did, was that it put a taskbar on my secondary monitor at the bottom as it should have.

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Thats good to hear, I had to rule out KDE as your issue so there you go.

You were right about pulseaudio being the culprit, your procedure restored the audio, and saved Kubuntu, because it was going down for the count. I know nothing about it, but previously when Googling audio problems, I came across some that claimed that using ALSA was a solution. Is ALSA an alternative to pulseaudio? Would it be a more reliable system?

seekermeister said:

You were right about pulseaudio being the culprit, your procedure restored the audio, and saved Kubuntu, because it was going down for the count. I know nothing about it, but previously when Googling audio problems, I came across some that claimed that using ALSA was a solution. Is ALSA an alternative to pulseaudio? Would it be a more reliable system?

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Yeah ALSA is an alternative to pulsesudio, in fact it was one of the earliest sound implimantations in Linux
Heck Linux is in the name: Advanced Linux Sound Architecture
There are advantages and disadvantages of ALSA over Pulse, on one hand ALSA is far more stable and reliable then Pulse, but pulse is better at multiple sound support. (meaning sometimes alsa wont allow more then one app to use the sound)
There is another sound system in linux called open sound system, which I have not seen used in a while as now OSS is now proprietary.
So you mainly have two main choices.
Pulse can have issues, but I would not recommend removing it, there is a guide on correcting sound issues but it involes commands and is made more for regular Ubuntu:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoundTroubleshootingProcedure

So I would not invest in that, I would just try that fix I gave you again if it messes up.
Its possible it wont happen again though, while pulse can be fluky once it sets fixed it stays fixed.
And if it does happen again at least you know what to do.
As for your XBMC issue to use it in windowed mode go to the settings section then click that to go to system and from there you can change your screen settings via the video output section.
You can also go into audio output section to change your audio settings

Yes, I had already decided to go back through this thread to collect all fixes in it, including that command line, because I can't trust my memory. With XBMC in windowed mode, would I be able to resize and move it as desired, and be free to you the cursor outside of it?

Yes, Windowed mode was the solution. I can now manage it the way that I want. I only wish that it would list all of the movies that I have, but it misses about 500 of them. I don't think that is anything that I can solve, because I suspect that it is just due to the fact that the scaper I use doesn't have any information on them.

seekermeister said:

Yes, Windowed mode was the solution. I can now manage it the way that I want. I only wish that it would list all of the movies that I have, but it misses about 500 of them. I don't think that is anything that I can solve, because I suspect that it is just due to the fact that the scaper I use doesn't have any information on them.

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Yeah probably so, but at least you got things up to speed for the most part.

Yes, that is mostly true, but there are still a few loose ends dangling here and there. I've been wondering, If I changed the scraper setting for the movie and rescanned the collection, would it keep what the other scraper had already found, and just add to it, or would it start over from scratch?

seekermeister said:

Yes, that is mostly true, but there are still a few loose ends dangling here and there. I've been wondering, If I changed the scraper setting for the movie and rescanned the collection, would it keep what the other scraper had already found, and just add to it, or would it start over from scratch?

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That I wouldnt know, I tend not to rip DVD's too often.
Never really needed to

Ralph Bromley said:

That I wouldnt know, I tend not to rip DVD's too often.
Never really needed to

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I think perhaps you misuderstood my question. A scraper is just the online database that XBMC uses to catalog and list a video file, nothing directly to do with ripping DVDs.

seekermeister said:

I think perhaps you misuderstood my question. A scraper is just the online database that XBMC uses to catalog and list a video file, nothing directly to do with ripping DVDs.

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Ah, yeah dont know what is going on there either.
I use XBMC on occasion, its not my main program for viewing multimedia.
You may wish to consult a XBMC guide there, I am more of a causal XBMC user and only fire it up on my HTPC.