Distro: Arch Linux Pulseaudio: 4.0-6 kmix: 4.11.2-1 I am able to mute audio via either the kmix applet or the mute button on my keyboard (both work fine). I am not able to unmute the audio via either option (both keyboard button and kmix applet don't work). In the case of using the keyboard shorcut the OSD is visualizing an unmute event but infact sound is not enabled. This is also the case with the kmix applet, visually the mute check-box becomes empty but sound is not enabled. For unmuting the audio I am able to use both pavucontrol and Veromix (both work fine). Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Mute audio via any method 2.Try to unmute using either keyboard shortcut or kmix applet Actual Results: Sound remains muted while visual indicator show it to be unmuted. Expected Results: Sound will unmute and resume working lshw of sound card (integraded with dell studio 1555 laptop): Audio device /0/100/1b product: 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio Controller [8086:293E] vendor: Intel Corporation [8086] bus info: pci@0000:00:1b.0 version: 03 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: Power Management, Message Signalled Interrupts, PCI Express, bus mastering, PCI capabilities listing configuration: driver: snd_hda_intel latency: 0 resources: irq: 46 memory: fc500000-fc503fff
Can you send a screenshot of your kmix. Typically this happens when kmix is built without PulseAudio support and you are just using it's ALSA interface. The "mute but no unmute" scenario can then happen when there are multiple items in the volume pipeline. PulseAudio manages all these items and controlling them outside of PA is not really supported/advised. To explain the process, on a typical card, you may have a "Master" and "PCM" kcontrol. Both of these are multiplied when controling the volume and both may have a mute. If you mute e.g. "Master", PA detects this external change and decides that the user wants to mute the "sink" in question. It then applies that mute fully - e.g. it mutes all elements in the pipeline and therefore "PCM" is also muted and PA pushes this change down to ALSA. Later you unmute Master, but PA still sees PCM as muted and therefore still considers the pipeline, and thus the sink, as muted until both PCM and Master are unmuted. I suspect this is what's going on here.
After reading your comment I noticed the settings menu option for "Select Master Channel...". It was set to my radeon video card HDMI port. Setting it to the "Built-in Audio Analog Stereo" seems to have fixed the issue. Unmute works fine now. Thanks :) Strangely, I can no longer reproduce the issue by placing the master back to the HDMI port. If I do that then the mute doesn't work as well as unmute, unlike the original issue.
OK this seems odd. After a reboot the menu layout has changed and the original issue went back (intel device is set as master, but a different menu is visible than the one I saw while writing the previous comment). This may have something do with weather or not veromix is installed. I will try and isolate the issue. The current kmix dialog (not the one I saw while writing the previous comment): http://i.imgur.com/k7UAAQD.png
Yes, that UI is what happens when Kmix cannot connect to PulseAudio for some reason. Just try retarting kmix and see if that helps.
Restarting Kmix makes it load the pulseaudio interface. This has to be done consistently after every boot. Also, It does not remember the Intel device as master and it has to be changed to it every time. Any recommended way to work around this?
Hmm, not sure why you need to restart kmix every time. It should autospawn PA when needed and connect to it, but something is obviously broken there. Ditto with remembering the master device, this should be saved and restored via kmix profiles. So there is clearly some kind of problem here rather than something that needs "worked around" per-se. It's kinda tricky to debug tho', so I'd likely need to reproduce it here to help more... but sadly it works fine for me! :(
For what it's worth, Veromix also fails to load properly at boot. The reason I thought it worked ok was because I loaded it after boot.
Issue seems to be resolved after editing /etc/pulse/client.conf to include autospawn = yes (was set to 'no'). Found on: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=167358
OK, so I would advise you guys to poke your relevant distro people about ensuring autospawn is enabled by default (which it is upstream). This isn't the only place where problems related to that will be exposed.