Audio Problem with Linux/Ubuntu

Support Basics & Interface
1

I’m having a problem getting audio playback when using Blender in Linux. I’ve done this in Windows so I’m pretty confident about the steps I’m doing.
I have both Sync and Scrub selected but when I scrub or Alt+A I don’t hear anything.
I’ve tried both “Audio (Ram)” and “Audio (HD)” when adding the audio to the sequencer. And I’ve tried just loading it directly in the Blender Sound Block. When I press “Play” from the Blender Sound Block I can hear it just fine so I know Blender can locate the file.
I’ve tried all the different sizes available for the Audio Mixing Buffer - one note about that: when I try Alt+A and then stop the playback, the Audio Mixing Buffer size I chose gets deselected.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

2

Yeah, audio in linux is always complicated :D. If your sound card doesn’t have hardware mixing, there can be only one program playing sound.

That wouldn’t be a problem if Blender was using just one sound output, but usually, there is a conflict between sequencer (SDL) and game engine (OpenAL).

Newer versions of Alsa have software mixing enabled by default. However SDL which Blender uses for sound output, defaults to OSS, which disables software mixing.

The first thing to try is “disable game sound” in user preferences or execute blender with

# blender -g noaudio

That however didn’t work for me very well, so I defaulted SDL to Alsa

# export SDL_AUDIODRIVER=alsa
# export AUDIODEV=default
# blender -w

This doesn’t work completely for me either. If I execute blender without any other program playing it blocks the soundcard for himself and doesn’t use software mixing.

So I have to listen to mp3s while executing blender, that forces it to use software mixing and works quite nice.

3

Recompiling SDL was the best way of fixing it for me.

4

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v639/Ryu_Kaiser/pressspeakerbutton.jpg

5

Thanks for the replies.
I had already tried Wolf’s suggestion - no luck.
I tried N30N’s suggestion - seemed promising but didn’t work for me.
I’m not sure were to type in the code from ondrew’s suggestion.

Thanks again for the ideas - I really hope I don’t have to stick with Windows for this.

1 Like
6

:frowning:

Paste it into the terminal program of your choice. :wink:

Good luck… :slight_smile:

7

You didn’t type Blender -g noaudio and then pressed the speaker button did you?

8

I finally got a chance to try out ondrew’s suggestion… It worked!:smiley:
I had to have music playing in the background when I started blender, but it worked!
Thanks for all the suggestions.

Oh, and Happy New Year!

9

I have the same problem here, also using Ubuntu, but I don’t want’ any mp3 playing in the background. I want to make a music video, and then another song in the background would be just terrible. I want to focus on the song, loaded in Blender.
When I press the play button, in the audio-options of the render-button-menu, I hear the song, but not when I play the animation, or sequence window.

The search goes on… lol

10

Have you tried recompiling SDL (instructions linked above)?