Hi all,
I’ve searched high and low…
Time came to upgrade from debian 12 to 13 (Trixie / stable). After this my three sound outputs all worked:
- optical out to hifi amp,
- usb out to digital audio interface, and
- hdmi/displayport out to display monitor’s speakers.
Then I installed Ardour
[Ardour 8.12.0~ds “Sonora Portraits” (rev 8.12.0~ds-1) Intel 64-bit]
…and opened a past project. I understand little of linux sound systems, but in the past I just used alsa settings without jack and it worked. This time I’ve read that Trixie defaults to using pipewire to connect everything up. On starting ardour I still chose the alsa options as I haven’t installed any jack stuff, and from what I can see there is no pipewire-jack or the like in my system. I mention that because jack/pipewire shows up in Ardour start options, even though it doesn’t work at all. So with alsa selected I was able to hear sound monitored externally on all of the three devices I have. All seemed well, but I noticed an odd thing early on…
Whenever I stopped and then started the Audio/Midi setup in Ardour to connect to a different output, the (non-Ardour) gnome sound settings GUI didn’t always display the matching output labels. Worse was to come…
When I closed Ardour altogether, my gnome sound settings got stuck on the USB audio interface, with no other output in sight. Reboots didn’t help, nor did restarting pipewire and wireplumber. I couldn’t use the other output devices any more. To be clear I’m not trying to use different outputs while using Ardour, I just want to be able to use different outputs once Ardour is closed.
I tried all sorts to no avail. Eventually I reinstalled the operating system, and sound worked as it should. I installed Ardour on top, ran it, and the same problem re-occurred. Only one sound output (usb) is now available after running Ardour. To be precise I can stick a 1/4 inch jack into the back of the computer and still get analogue sound out, but that’s not an output I wanted to use. Obviously reinstalling the OS after running Ardour each time isn’t practical.
Most search hits I found relate to pre-pipewire / pre-trixie setups so I’m not surprised they haven’t helped. There’s one item on this forum that talks of ‘killing’ Jack, which to my knowledge I don’'t have. Everything I’ve read about sound on trixie seems to imply it should just work without the extra effort that previous Debian versions needed. So not sure what more I can do.
Hoping this is a helpful clue, I get:
~$ aplay -l
List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 0: ALC897 Analog [ALC897 Analog]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 1: ALC897 Digital [ALC897 Digital]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 3: HDMI 0 [PL3493WQ]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 7: HDMI 1 [HDMI 1]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 8: HDMI 2 [HDMI 2]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 9: HDMI 3 [HDMI 3]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: U192k [UMC204HD 192k], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio]
Subdevices: 0/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
I presume the above devices should not all have the same card and subdevice number!
So I’m wondering, is there some simple command I can use to make gnome get a grip again on all the hardware outputs after running Ardour?
