On 05/07/18 08:54, Adam Carter wrote: > Does anyone know of a reason why this would happen? > > > Is firefox built with pulseaudio? If so, check the pavucontrol settings > too (media-sound/pavucontrol) > > Perhaps VLC is talking directly to ALSA, but firefox is talking to > pulseaudio to get to ALSA, and there's an issue with pulse hence the > discrepancy between VLC and firefox.
No PulseAudio on the machine, Lennart makes my skin crawl, and I think you can infer from that that there has never been PulseAudio on the machine. It basically boils down to: Before holiday -> Firefox/Youtube makes noise. Go away for a holiday Come back from holiday Turn on computer -> no boot, "dead in the water", "this is an ex-parrot". ... ... ... etc Whilst writing this I had a brain wave. Was Firefox hardcoded/defaulting to "reading/writing/working" the first discovered sound card? I subsequently removed the tricks that I had done to get VLC working and rebooted. No sound as expected. "lspci -nn | grep -i audio" and "aplayer -l" shows the nVidia chip to be first: 0a:00.1 Audio device [0403]: NVIDIA Corporation GP106 High Definition Audio Controller [10de:10f1] (rev a1) 0c:00.3 Audio device [0403]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Device [1022:1457] so can I disable the HDMI sound chip with an ebuild option in the nvidia ebuild - it appears not. Next can I reorder the discovery/assignment process? More googling found: https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-hardware-18/wrong-sound-card-order-in-alsa-4175544059/ and http://docs.slackware.com/howtos:hardware:audio_and_snd-hda-intel which resulted in me having to rebuild my kernel as I usually have everything linked in, no modules, and updating the /etc/modprobe.d/alsa.conf file. I added the lines below. Note that the vid & pid values for the AMD are now assigned first. alias snd-card-0 snd-hda-intel alias snd-card-1 snd-hda-intel options snd-hda-intel index=0 vid=1022 pid=1457 options snd-hda-intel index=1 vid=10de pid=10f1 A reboot and I now have sound everywhere - YEAH!!!!!! There is every chance that someone way more versed in the innards of the boot process may indicate holes in the above but hey, it works. Andrew