Audio Anomalies in Ubuntu 8.10
Posted on November 20, 2008 by voodooguru
Having just claimed that my Skype problems were fixed, I found the very next day that things no longer worked. Why? Well it turns out that in last night’s Ubuntu update, there was an attempt to fix the audio problems because the sudo alsamixer this time brought up only a single bar whereas there had been multiple bars before. In the audio options in Skype, there was now an additional choice called Pulse that had not been there last night. Choosing this instead of the default option in Skype seemed to fix the problem but the sound playback this time was not so good. On the way to discovering this, I tried sudo killall pulseaudio which brought back all the bars to alsamixer but did not resolve the problem. On rebooting the machine, the pulse audio is enabled once again and then I stumbled on the solution or what seems like the solution.
It will be interesting to hear how Skype holds up on the next occasion that somebody calls me. The sound recording from within Ubuntu (not from within Skype) now works whereas it didn’t before. However, the volume of my recorded voice seemed rather low, even at the maximum settings. It would seem that the audio situation in Ubuntu remains unstable. The lesson I’ve learned from this is not to jump in straight away and download the lastest release as soon as it appears on the Internet. It’s a good idea to give it at least a month so that some of the inevitable bugs are sorted out.
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