Fix no sound in Adobe Flash on Linux under Firefox, Chromium, Opera et al.



After moving to Ubuntu 11.10 I have been experiencing issues with Adobe Flash not playing sound at all through any brower on this PulseAudio equipped operating system. PulseAudio is a sound server which accepts sound input from one or more sources and redirects it to one or more sinks (E.g. sound cards). One of the goals of PulseAudio is to reroute all sound streams through it; common issues include programs locking the ALSA sound device which then prevents other applications from mixing and using the audio device. To correct the issue I experienced with Opera and Flash I followed the following method which routes ALSA apps directly through pulse:



First create a global ALSA config file:
sudo touch /etc/asound.conf


Edit the blank config file:
sudo gedit /etc/asound.conf


Copy/paste these lines into the config file:


pcm.pulse { type pulse }
ctl.pulse { type pulse }
pcm.!default { type pulse }
ctl.!default { type pulse }


Save and exit.


Now time to kill pulseaudio, it will automatically restart:



sudo killall pulseaudio


And finally restart the browser, audio sound should now route correctly.

9 comments:

  1. THANKS !

    This bug was driving me crazy. I am on Ubuntu 10.04 with Firefox 11. It was not only Flash that was missing sound, but also Firefox playing WebM or Ogg Theora movies directly. This fixes everything !

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  2. Thanks a million! I was missing voice in Flash in Opera on Ubuntu 10.04. This fixed it.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thank you so much! You really saved the day!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thanks!!! Helped a lot on CentOS 6.2 x86_64 dekstop :)

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  5. Sound was working fine in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS for several years, then had a hellish time attempting to upgrade to the 12.04 LTS, so re-installed 10.04 LTS; worked okay for a while, then recently sound cut out on Firefox/Flash; but worked from other sources stored on drives.

    Was stymied and tried a bunch of fixes; and this one worked the charm.

    Thanks a million.

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  6. How do you fix it for ALSA users that have hardware mixing. Pulse is for poor people that can not afford hardware mixing and dsp.

    ReplyDelete
  7. How do you fix it for ALSA users that have hardware mixing. Pulse is for poor people that can not afford hardware mixing and dsp.

    ReplyDelete

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