Bug 493790

Please be more elaborate. What do you my "stopped working"? Do the applications appear to play music but you cannot hear anything? Most likely this is a mixer initialization issue then which can be fixed by playing around with "alsamixer -c0".

Yes, this is exactly right -- applications appear to play music but I can not hear anything. This used to work just fine in F8 (except for the occasional PA crash). 

I've tried "alsamixer" and indeed it worked. However, how should I know about this? Before I used to double click on the volume control (and as confusing as that thing used to be), I could do it from there? Not anymore. 

I think a regular user would have _zero_ chance of figuring this out. I am an experienced user, tried Googling it, etc for 1-2h, to no avail. Why would be the sound turned off by default? Why do I even have to mess around with alsamixer -c0?

This has been a problem as far as I can remember, the only difference now is that there's no easy way to fix it (graphically). Can this be fixed properly?

It's a bug in the default mixer initialization of ALSA. Reassigning.

ALSA maintains a databse of default mixer initializations for different hardware. You sound card needs to be added there.

Please, attach output from 'alsa-info.sh --no-upload' script.

And elaborate which mixer controls should be initialized for your hardware with 'alsamixer -c0'. Thanks.

Created attachment 338137 [details]
alsa-info.sh --no-upload

I can't quite remember which ones I had to change, but 
these are the controls that I see for Playback:

Master 
Headphon    
PCM     
Front    
Front Mi 
Front Mi 
Surround   
Center    
LFE       
Side     
Line      
CD       
Mic    
Mic Boos   
IEC958  
IEC958 D 
IEC958 P    
Mono   
Analog M

Dimi: try this, as root:

cp /etc/asound.state /etc/asound.state.bak
alsactl restore

that should reset all volumes to default, which should hopefully make the problem exist again. then you can fix it again, this time taking a note of which channels you need to adjust (and how) to make things work. thanks.

-- 
Fedora Bugzappers volunteer triage team
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers

(or just 'alsactl init' should do it in fact)

-- 
Fedora Bugzappers volunteer triage team
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers

Hm, first result:

[root@dimi ~]# cp /etc/asound.state /etc/asound.state.bak
[root@dimi ~]# alsactl init
Unknown hardware: "HDA-Intel" "Analog Devices AD1988B" "HDA:11d4198b,104381f6,00100200" "" ""
Hardware is initialized using a guess method

I can see after the init that 
   PCM is at 61
 Front is at 67
Master is at 64

AFAICT, Master can be controlled through the Volume Control, but the others should be at 100, no?

Also, after the init I get no more sound. I tried killing pulseaudio, but still no sound :(

yes. er, maybe i'm not explaining very well.

I expected the problem would show up again after doing 'alsamixer init'. That's what I *wanted* to happen :). The point being that you can then recreate the fix, and make a note of which channel you had to adjust to make things work. That will then let us know what the correct fix will be.

-- 
Fedora Bugzappers volunteer triage team
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers

No, I understood -- it's just that after the init, I couldn't restore sound, no matter what I did.

However, I just updated to latest, rebooted, and the sound (and ALSA settings) where OK, so I guess it has been fixed.

so, um, just to get a handle on this - if you now do 'alsamixer init' again, sound is still fine? or you have to adjust something subsequent to the 'alsamixer init' to get sound?

This seems to be OK now, 'alsactl init' doesn't seem to mess with the sound.

However, now I get this:

[root@dimi ~]# alsactl init
Unknown hardware: "USB-Audio" "USB Mixer" "USB047f:0ca1" "" ""
Hardware is initialized using a guess method

Here is my ALSA information:
    http://www.alsa-project.org/db/?f=4e671874d8c62ad8525415bed16ba06b307cb08e

as long as you get working sound after 'alsactl init', all is good, the default values are good, and there's no bug. "Hardware is initialized using a guess method" isn't a problem, it just means there's no explicit configuration in the database for that device so it's using the defaults. Which are obviously fine.