[pulseaudio-discuss] No sound on ARM CPU

[Alexander E. Patrakov]

27.08.2014 03:57, Matthias Großmann wrote:
> Hi,
>
> when playing audio files on a QNAP TS-212 NAS (ARM CPU) / Creative
> Sound Blaster X-Fi HD USB sound card, I do not hear any
> sound. Commands like "paplay spacemusic.au" or "aplay spacemusic.au"
> block for the duration of the audio file and return without an error
> message, but do not produce anything audible.
>
> Playing audio files bypassing pulseaudio with "aplay -D sysdefault
> spacemusic.au" works (apart from occasional crackling and pauses,
> which is probably a different problem). When connected to my notebook
> (i386), the sound card works even with pulseaudio, so this appears to
> be an ARM specific problem.
>
> According to the log files, the sink is not muted and the volume is
> above 50%.
>
> I tried to delete ~/.pulse*, which did not change anything.
>
> OS on both the NAS and the notebook is Debian 7.6 (wheezy) with
> PulseAudio 2.0
>
> Log files can be found in the original report of this problem
> (https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=756850).
>
> Any help is very much appreciated.

Just a shot in the dark: on your NAS, speex (used for resampling) might 
be compiled to use fixed-point support internally instead of the usual 
floating-point. PulseAudio 2.0 is incompatible with such speex. A fix is 
in the recent git. Please try an equivalent change in configuration.

In /etc/pulse/daemon.conf, please write:

resample-method = speex-fixed-3

or, if that eats too much CPU and you don't mind some slightly audible 
distortions on pure tones above 2 kHz, try speex-fixed-1.

-- 
Alexander E. Patrakov