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Xperia X: everything that touches audio is rooted

Tracked by Jolla (In release)

asked 2018-10-04 09:39:54 +0200

y1fmD gravatar image

updated 2018-10-09 08:22:50 +0200

So I installed the latest system update yesterday*, and today my alarm did not go off -- well, it did trigger, but it didn;t sound. This lead me to poke around and discover that a number of other things are non-functional:

Changing anything in the "Tones" section of "Sounds and Feedback" in Settings. The provided music play, "Media" does not start. Third party alternatives Muuzik! and Daedalus suffer the same. Loading up a video from Gallery causes the application to freeze. Trying to make a phonecall simply doesn't work (calling a contact is unresponsive, manually dialing also fails). Using my landline (i.e. another phone) to call myself gets me an instantly missed call (nothing pops up, except a message in the notification stream). Probably other stuff.

What does work, and seems relevant, is SMS (though without sounds), and a third-party music player**, QuasarMX, both starts and does play music. So the networking appears to be fine, and I'm wondering if the problem lies with PA and (warning: 100% speculation) QuasarMX bypasses it by using ALSA directly or something.

I would quite like to fix this rather than wiping it and hoping for the best, as that would be a bit of a pain and wouldn't identify any bugs, incompatibilities, or user errors that created the problem.

Thanks =).

*Delayed as I was overseas and didn't want to risk breaking a functioning system that I needed (digital boarding passes don't pass muster if you can't digital :P).

**I know, I have a bunch of them. Have yet to find one that's fully satisfactory...

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3

A few days ago the alarm clock of my Xperia X didn't ring. I saw the ringer screen but there was no sound despite ringer and media volume set to 60%. When I tested the alarm clock sound in settings it played as expected. I scheduled another alarm and again: ringer screen but no sound. Other system sounds were muted as well. I never experienced this behavior before. Maybe some issue in 2.2.1.18?

Olsen ( 2018-10-04 21:23:49 +0200 )edit
2

I can second the audio problems. For example today it was not able to switch from phone to speaker and back. I opened a request for pulse audio upgrade. I recall Jolla was cautious releasing newer version of pulse audio, but we insisted as PA 8 was far too old. Now they released PA11.1 which I had on my desktop and was confronted with similar issues. I upgraded to 11.99 and problems are gone. Someone else suggested that even more problems are gone with 12.2. I hope Jolla hears our voice. Please upvote related.

deloptes ( 2018-10-04 22:17:31 +0200 )edit

I have slightly different problem since the update: Sound over the headphones is … bad. White noise and whole frequencies missing, at least it sounds very different from when I simply use the speakers.

Ignaz ( 2018-10-09 02:13:07 +0200 )edit
1

@Ignaz it sounds like bad contact of the headphones jack. I had the same few days ago, did you check with the XperiaX headphones ? Did you try any other ?

nas ( 2018-10-09 10:39:07 +0200 )edit
2

@nas Now I did (cough) and during that test I had to turn up the volume to hear something: Clear and perfect sound. That gave me an idea: Try different volumes with the earpieces I actually had troubles with. Turns out, the white noise and “missing” frequency is only a problem on the lowest and probably the second lowest volume level. I would bet though that I did not have these issues approximately a month ago, basically just before the update. Anyway, it’s hard to proof it without rolling back the update (which would mean resetting the device, I guess), so I’ll just have to learn to live with it. Also I’m a bit ashamed that I didn’t think of testing it with different headphones before reporting here. Forgive me, please!

Ignaz ( 2018-10-09 19:38:05 +0200 )edit

2 Answers

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answered 2018-10-10 17:30:25 +0200

jusa gravatar image

A couple of questions to those of you who get the "alarm not audible" bug:

  1. does reboot help?
  2. after seeing the bug, when you open new app (for example jolla-notes) and you open pulley menu, does the menu get stuck?
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  1. I experienced this issue only once but a reboot helped.

  2. I'll try if it happens again...

Olsen ( 2018-10-10 18:46:30 +0200 )edit

One of the first things I tried was turning it off then on again. I've just tried it again, and still no joy: an alarm set for a minute from now does not sound, Media still does not start, and phonecalls are still not happening. I have no issues with pulldown menus; issues do seem restricted to things which tie into the audio system.

If someone with a working phone could turn off PulseAudio and see if the consequences are similar, I would be interested to see the results (and, if it does cause a bunch of stuff to fall over, that might be something to look into, and at least get some sort of error to pop up -- failing silently makes for a frustrating user experience, especially for basic functionality like phonecalls).

y1fmD ( 2018-10-11 04:15:05 +0200 )edit

I did not understand your point in turning off PA. When you turn off PA expected behavior is that no sound is produced. You are not supposed to switch off PA. Do not do this unless you know what you are doing.

deloptes ( 2018-10-11 12:56:14 +0200 )edit

Yes, without the sound system there is no sound. But my problems extend beyond an absence of sound, with various pieces of software simply not working (e.g. the default music player), freezing (Settings, if I try to change any of the tones), or otherwise being dysfunctional. So I'm curious whether the various side effects are unique to the bug or in line with behaviour when there is straight up no PA for things to call on.

EDIT: And my assumption is that anyone who does it (temporarily, of course) without instructions provided will know what they're doing and how to un-do it.

y1fmD ( 2018-10-11 15:20:13 +0200 )edit

Do you have the problems when PA is running?

The rest of the discussion is obsolete. You can try debugging PA as mentioned here especially

  • Missing playback devices or audio capture

when you go for

  • Disabling daemon autospawn you can run pulseaudio server manually with debugging from the command line and read the debugging output. Then paste here to clarify.
deloptes ( 2018-10-11 16:47:48 +0200 )edit
2

answered 2019-01-30 14:43:42 +0200

y1fmD gravatar image

For posterity, what happened with me is that I eventually traced it back to GStreamer, and found a ton of duplicate processes were running (I can find "booster-silica-qt5" by checking my BASH history, though I forget what else there may have been). Killing things helped.

Can't really dissect it at this point, but it may help someone, sometime, to know gstreamer can -however it happens- bugger everything and cause the symptoms I described.

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Asked: 2018-10-04 09:39:54 +0200

Seen: 1,355 times

Last updated: Jan 30 '19