No sound in web browsers

[Matmat]

Hello community,

Before I discuss the topic, I must say that I am an absolute newbie at Linux and Kxstudio. I just got rid of Windows yesterday and installed KXStudio. I've been wanting do this for a long time and finally took that step. I'm very excited about this I know that I have a load of reading and learning and messing around to do before I can discuss topics with the community and properly ask for help. However, I now have an urgent problem at hand, because it is preventing me from learning some tunes off of Youtube that I have to learn fast! So I ask for you to please bare with me, even though I haven't properly done my Linux homework yet... Still, before writing here, I did some research and read a bunch of forum posts but couldn't find a solution.

I just installed KXStudio from the latest disk image I got from the website, then ran the KXStudio Welcome screen with "force reset of all settings" enabled (I just tried doing this again and restarting but it didn't solve the problem). Then, Youtube worked fine on Firefox. Since then, while messing around Synaptic Package Manager, I thought it would be a good idea to click "Mark All Upgrades" and Apply, and by doing this I got the latest version of Firefox.

So, as you must be aware, Firefox now requires PulseAudio and doesn't support ALSA anymore, and KXStudio runs with ALSA (I have pretty much no idea what this means... ). After the update, when I go on a Youtube video I get no sound and a banner that says "To play audio, you may need to install the required PulseAudio software" with a link to: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/fi ... deo-issues

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/s ... out-sound/
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1 ... art-0.html

So I installed PulseAudio from Synaptic. (From the superficial Linux reading I've done, I understand that the best way to install new software on Linux is through a Package Manager. This is something that I don't understand well yet...). The only change this did is that I don't get the Firefox banner prompting me to install PA with the link to the FF help page, still no sound.

I read somewhere something about ESD so I also installed "pulseaudio-esound-compat, PulseAudio ESD compatibility layer" from Synaptic (which was not in the "pulseaudio, PulseAudio sound server" package dependencies), that didn't work either.

Some people on some forums said they use Chromium because of this issue, so I installed it, but Youtube doesn't produce any sound on Chromium either!

I asked the question on an IRC channel, and someone answered saying they use APulse https://github.com/i-rinat/apulse which makes FF believe it's using AP. To be honest, I don't understand how to install this, I don't know what Git is... He also said that you can't use it with Jack at the same time. This seems to be a bit of a pain, since from what I understand, Jack is really important in KXStudio if I want to use music software.

I found a workaround suggested on a forum, which is to download the Youtube video and use a media player, and that works fine. So I am not entirely crippled.

Sorry for the very long message, but I'm very confused right now... Hopefully there is a simple solution to this. I am aware that I will need to study a little bit to get more comfortable, and looking forward to that, but in the mean time I'd be very grateful if someone could guide me through a way to watch Youtube ! And hopefully this could help other people since this seems to be a very common problem.

[sysrqer]

In cadence, which bridges to you have enabled?
Or stop jack and make sure pulseaudio is running...still no sound?

[Matmat]

Thank you for your answer.

In cadence, which bridges to you have enabled?

I don't know what that means... I opened Cadence and saw nothing about bridges.

Or stop jack and make sure pulseaudio is running...still no sound?

That worked! In Cadence, I first stopped Jack and saw that PulseAudio was not running and the "Start" button was greyed-out, so I checked the "Auto-start at login" box and rebooted and lo and behold, PulseAudio is running and Youtube has sound!
However, "JACK Status" says it is running and ALSA also says that it is started, so I still don't understand what any of this changes, if it could create any incompatibility and why some people seem to dislike PulseAudio (or is it just being pissed off at having to install something useless and use CPU?) Anyway, thanks for the help !

[sysrqer]

Pulseaudio used to be a bit of a pain but it's not much of a problem these days. In cadence there should be a section towards the bottom for the pulseaudio bridge, if that is running then you should be good to go. I think you just didn't have the bridge enabled so Jack was probably blocking pulseaudio rather than letting it through.

[Matmat]

Dammit, I see it now, it says JACK Bridges, right there under my eyes. Yes, you are probably right, that's what it looks like. Thanks. So I wonder, the KXStudio release I got is from June 9 2017, so posterior to this Firefox update, so why not include the latest Firefox and PulseAudio ? Would it have been wiser for me not to update everything from Synaptic ?

[sysrqer]

I don't know the answer to that but I don't think it is advisable not to update, especially things like browsers.

[CraigPid]

I think you need to install "pulseaudio-module-jack" to get the pulseaudio bridge to work. You have pulseaudio installed but it's not bridged to jack. Install the bridge and then when Cadence starts jack it will route pulseaudio through jack and you won't have to think about it.

[mendo]

I had a similar issue recently: Pulseaudio sink broken

I also assume that some update broke it. Still no idea how to bring this back to work.

[Matmat]

I think you need to install "pulseaudio-module-jack" to get the pulseaudio bridge to work. You have pulseaudio installed but it's not bridged to jack. Install the bridge and then when Cadence starts jack it will route pulseaudio through jack and you won't have to think about it.

I had installed this because it was in the "pulseaudio" dependencies, however, it was not enough. What worked was checking the "Auto-start at login" box in the PulseAudio bridge section of Cadence then restarting. Since then I've had no issue.

I had a similar issue recently: Pulseaudio sink broken

I also assume that some update broke it. Still no idea how to bring this back to work.

I'm sorry about that, I can't help you but I hope you find a solution.

Cheers to all!