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Linux sound either absent or buzzes

Postby wayfarer » Mon Nov 16, 2009 8:01 am

I am running Ubuntu 9.10 and have perused the forums here and tried virtually every fix I have read to correct this nagging problem I have with Smokin' Guns. Whenever the game starts I hear a buzzing sound through the speakers. When I turn down the music (an error message has appeared in the console while loading reporting a failure to load the sound buffer for the music), the buzzing goes away, but within a few mouse movements so does the clicking on the main menu items.

I have tried deleting the q3config.cfg to start again with default settings. The music plays for a while then the buzzing starts again. I had added the line "set s_useopenal 0" and while the info in the console reports the sound initialized successfully, there is no sound at all (driver is ALSA-Pulse). If I omit the line, I cannot quit the game without everything crashing, forcing a reboot.

This is driving me crazy.

I have adjusted and tweaked until my eyes crossed and my nerves frayed.

Quite simply, help.
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Postby Tequila » Mon Nov 16, 2009 11:16 am

Hi and welcome to our forum,

yes sound is sometime tricky to setup under linux. Can you tell us more about your sound hardware ? Have you installed 32bits or 64bits Ubuntu system ? Have you trouble with any other game ? Which Smokin'Guns engine version are you using ? Assuming you're using Smokin'Guns 1.0, can you try our current beta engine which has many fixes around OpenAL, thanks to ioQuake3 team (especially Thilo ;)) ? Can you report you console output in a tool like pastebin.com and give us the related link ? Try to reproduce the complete console output where you deleted the q3config.cfg, you run the game without trouble and you finally got it buzzing again.

About Alsa subsystem, you may want also to report information from 'alsa-info' script. You may need to install an alsa-utils package if you don't have this script or you can just download it from the official site at alsa-info.sh. Try to start it which '--pastebin' option so it will propose you to upload the report in pastebin site. As example, here is my own report.

If you try SG engine v1.1b2 from the current public beta, try also to use the one built by sparcdr for Ubuntu (check Get your v1.1b2 BETA files here to find it).
Then you should report the problem in the following thread: About any sound problems to share your experience.
8)
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Postby /dev/random » Mon Nov 16, 2009 6:45 pm

It seems like Ubuntu 9.10 has problems with ioQuake.
A "World of Padman" player has reported a similar problem (german text), no solution yet.

Google yields the following tipp;
sudo apt-get remove libsdl1.2debian-alsa
sudo apt-get install libsdl1.2debian-pulseaudio
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Postby Lukasijus » Sat Nov 21, 2009 11:30 am

I had buzzing sound problem too, but this is how I fixed it:
Tequila wrote:You can try without using OpenAl by using the console to:
1. disable openal by setting s_useOpenal to 0
2. and restart the sound system, using snd_restart command
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Postby wayfarer » Wed Nov 25, 2009 3:47 am

Thanks for the replies, but the sound problems proved to be more than just present in Smokin' Guns. After nearly two weeks of searching and reading tips and tricks for solving the problem, I stumbled upon something myself. To update, I am running Ubuntu 9.10, which included Gnome and the "infamous" pulseaudio sound server. My sound card is of the Sound Blaster persuasion, which has also generated more than a few "tsk, tsk, tsk, poor bastard" comments during my searches. "Web"sters recommended everything from doctoring the system-wide alsa configuration files to uninstalling pulse and ALSA entirely, replacing it with the OSS sound system, or even removing a demonstratedly (I have Smokin' Guns on the Windows system from which I am escaping) healthy 24-bit sound card in favor of an on-board Yamaha sound chipset.

Uhm, thanks, but I'll keep looking...

I did over the period of my search try out perhaps as many as 30 fixes with little and no success, and probably read five+ times that many. Having worked on the Windows end of the computer business since 1.0 debuted about 20 years ago, some of them made sense on a very basic hardware-software-getting-along level, so toward the end of my frustrating experimentation, I focused in on them.

First, for those poor bastards with either a Sound Blaster or pulseaudio or both: fire up Synaptic and download the following:

padevchooser -- to set default servers for pulseaudio and it needs
paman
paprefs
pavucontrol
pavumeter

In the "Sound and Video" folder fire up "Pulse Audio Device Chooser." It will load as an icon in the system tray. Right-click on it and go to preferences and set it to run on system startup. Close that window and left-click on the icon and set the "Default Server" to, imagine, default.

Then open up a terminal and type:
sudo gedit /etc/openal/alsoft.conf

Add the following line directly underneath the "drivers" subsection, so you know what to remove if this does not work for you:
drivers = pulseaudio

I can only claim partial credit of blame for this because some guru suggested just using the word "pulse" for the driver but that did not work
and caused Smokin' Guns to lock up Gnome so tight I had to reboot. That particular guru suggested adding the same thing, using pulse again, to another file and because my tweak worked on the first, I recommend you also do the following:
sudo gedit /etc/libao.conf

Add this line:
default_driver=pulseaudio

This apparently affects those programs that use "libao," and while I saw a brief list of programs that used it, I had none so I hardly paid attention.

Reboot the system and try to run Smokin' Guns without the lines the previous post recommended in an autoexec.cfg. I have duplicated success with this on three separate occasions, myself and two other Ubuntu-Sound Blaster-Pulseaudio sufferers. In each case, all the other files I happened to install in failed attempts at a fix were not part of the formula. What I noted above was.

I only hope this can help someone else.

I am not so confident to mark this thread as SOLVED, but if more than a few people post success stories, someone else can do so for me.

For those of you who do not have success with this, I can give you a list of websites to explore and a few other programs and libraries I installed during what I call the "Soundless Days."

Grinning here, boss...finally.
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Postby ReD NeCKersoN » Wed Nov 25, 2009 4:55 am

Ouch. And my linux friends here keep telling me I should switch over from windows. :P Glad you got it working & thanks for posting your proposed remedy. Oh, and welcome to the forum.
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Postby Tequila » Wed Nov 25, 2009 10:22 pm

:D

I finally got such problem with the last openal-soft package update in Fedora 11. I was lucky and find I just had to start the game with "+set s_alDevide 'PulseAudio Software'"... This forces the game to use directly the best subsystem and this is finally what you did by forcing pulseaudio subsystem in system OpenAl configuration.

Then you should know I'm working on an UI enhancement to let people chooses the best device directly from the new sound panel which enahnced OpenAL support.

Thanks for your accurate report wayfarer, it is really useful.
8)

ReD NeCKersoN wrote:Ouch...
Come on, I guaranty your brain will gain 10 years of youth if you decide switch over ;)
I can tell also it's always easier when you have some linux friends around you ;)
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Postby L3th4l » Wed Nov 25, 2009 11:21 pm

Tequila wrote:Come on, I guaranty your brain will gain 10 years of youth if you decide switch over ;)
I can tell also it's always easier when you have some linux friends around you ;)


You forgot to tell him he will die 10 years earlier though from all the stress it causes. :wink:
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Postby zivs » Sun Jan 17, 2010 6:35 pm

Wow - this is what I've been looking for for a while (until realized that there's search option also in forums) - will see if it works (also Ubuntu 9.10 64bit)! Thanks for the tip, man! :wink:
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Postby Terribly.Important.Person » Mon Feb 01, 2010 2:59 am

It's the version of ALSA that's the problem. Check out this link for a bit of an explanation.
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