Audio problems with YouTube

The no sound problems are not limited to muic videos. Using Firefox it seems quite random whether a given video will have sound or not. In one case (so far) the sound came on after the video had been running for a couple of minutes.

Sound is taken off the HDMI output by the monitor and sent to the amp/speakers via headphone jack on the monitor. No indication it's a bad connection, in that replugging the audio cable has no effect. The video is fine at all times.

One oddity is that there's no sound icon in the top menu bar. Raspi-config reports the audio output goes to hdmi, and that is at least sometimes true. The lack of a GUI sound control seems a bit strange, and perhaps a clue.

Can anybody tell me the name of the program that normally puts the sound control icon in the top level menu? Maybe it can be reinstalled.

Thanks for reading,

bob prohaska

In the end it turned out that pulseaudio had to be installed. Manually, for some reason. The package name escapes me and I could not find the link to the solution in my search history.

Anyway, sound seems to work now.

hth,

bob prohaska

Yeah bob, ISTR I had to do the same on my 'Pi-Fi' system.

Like you, no idea why...

Must have been a very local oddity in our setups. The lack of net traffic makes clear that very few people had the problem.

Thanks for writing,

bob prohaska

I think the issue is that I was running a headless server installation. I had no desktop or even x windows, and as such most of the normal audio stuff wasnt installed.

I just kept adding sound packages until it worked

I am surprised that pulseaudio is not an installation default on a PI desktop. It is on this *86 desktop

For Firefox, I consider it a feature for it not to be able to access audio. There's no circumstance where that behaviour is desirable to me in a web browser (I always download videos separately). So I don't want any audio dependencies installed with it.

As a side-note, it's possible to compile Firefox with either PulseAudio or ALSA audio support, so the exact behaviour might depend on which was selected by the package creator for your distro.

On Wed, 21 Dec 2022 19:27:34 +0000, The Natural Philosopher snipped-for-privacy@invalid.invalid declaimed the following:

But if you've just been running apt update/apt upgrade on a pre-December-2020 install, it wouldn't be.

Its possible to mute a firefox tab. I think its possible to disallow it to access audio entirely. Not sure and cant be arsed to look

Mmm. That's another thought entirely. In which case if you got it from a distro its should have e.g.pulseaudio as a dependency

I do recall that the programs I installed that didn't work didn't have pulse audio as a dependency either.

Think my install predates that

That might be the answer to my confusion. Looks like my system was set up in February 2020, so no default pulseaudio.

But, using apt-update/upgrade, wouldn't an update to chromium have pulled in pulseaudio? /usr/bin/chromium-browser is dated October, 2021.

Or, have I locked myself into an obsolete browser?

Thanks for writing!

bob prohaska

On Thu, 22 Dec 2022 19:20:27 -0000 (UTC), bob prohaska snipped-for-privacy@www.zefox.net>

declaimed the following:

On a Buster system (actually a Pi-Star custom configuration of Raspberry Buster).

chromium-browser/oldstable 92.0.4515.98~buster-rpt2 armhf Chromium web browser, open-source version of Chrome

Depends: libasound2 (>= 1.0.16), libatk-bridge2.0-0 (>= 2.5.3), libatk1.0-0 (>= 2.2.0), libatspi2.0-0 (>= 2.9.90), libc6 (>= 2.16), libcairo2 (>=

I believe "libasound" is the ALSA interface.

On a system running Bullseye I show

chromium-browser/stable,now 104.0.5112.105-rpt2 armhf [installed] Chromium web browser, open-source version of Chrome

Depends: libasound2 (>= 1.0.16), libatk-bridge2.0-0 (>= 2.5.3), libatk1.0-0 (>= 2.2.0), libatspi2.0-0 (>= 2.9.90), libc6 (>= 2.17), libcairo2 (>=

Note that last item -- I think libpulse0 is the PulseAudio interface.

So... Buster has not added PulseAudio as a requirement to the browser, Bullseye appears to have added it.

Does the name (Buster or Bullseye) appear in any system query command? Uname doesn't mention it at all and I don't remember what I selected 8-(

Thanks for writing!

bob prohaska

"cat /etc/debian_version".

X@raspberrypi:~ $ uname -a Linux raspberrypi 5.15.76+ #1597 Fri Nov 4 12:11:43 GMT 2022 armv6l GNU/Linux

X@raspberrypi:~ $ cat /etc/debian_version

^^^

gives me 9.13, so I am in fact no wiser :-).

-- "I guess a rattlesnake ain't risponsible fer bein' a rattlesnake, but ah puts mah heel on um jess the same if'n I catches him around mah chillun".

Sounds like 'stretch'

On Sat, 24 Dec 2022 13:47:48 +0000, The Natural Philosopher snipped-for-privacy@invalid.invalid declaimed the following:

That is ANCIENT... That's not even Buster.

Buster is 10.x Bullseye is 11.x

You appear to be running Stretch, which I'm pretty sure ended support a few years ago (Even Buster may be in security-only updates, since Debian tends to run a two year cycle and Bullseye came out last year).

I actually prefer the version numbers to the names because I can never remember the order of the latter (except by trying to remember its corresponding number, in which case the name is just surplus information).