No Audio in Flash Player (Ubuntu Hardy)?

Have you been having issues with Audio on Flash player or maybe no audio at all in Flash? Sometimes when running multiple audio streams, having no audio from one or more sources.. or any other weird issues regarding sound? Are you using Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Haron)? Well, This version of Ubuntu install PulseAudio by default and even being really cool, it does give some issues at times. Note that I have installed the “restricted extras” and running the actual flash player 9 (not gwflash or anything). And as 8.04 default, Im runnign this on FireFox 3. I fixed all of mine pretty easily. It’s strange, but the flash player probably does not install “libflashsupport ” or “libflash” by default, so please install that. Even being a LTS release, Ubuntu included a beta browser as default – it still leaves me confused. Now, go to System > Preferences > Sound, and change all the options to “PulseAudio Server”. Do a reboot if needed, and things should work just fine. I’ve seen this on multiple PCs, starnge Ubuntu haven’t fixed it. This might be applicable to older Ubuntu versions if you are using PulseAudio as well.

PulseAudio

Linux audio has been confusing enough for me for last 6 years, but I always knew it lacked the same level of quality that I had on windows. With the all new PulseAudio, this is about to change – the sound server will now provide countless never before found features to many Linux users, many of these features are also not found on Windows itself. Here are some of stuffs you can expect from PulseAudio:

Software mixing of multiple audio streams, bypassing any restrictions the hardware has. This means with proper audio applications designed to take advantage of PulseAudio – a lot more audio streams can be handled all at once regardless what the sound card has to offer: of course now more CPU use will come into play. But do note, this is a zero-copy memory architecture for processor resource efficiency.

What’s even cooler is the ability to combine multiple sound cards into one – even if the sound cards are on separate PCs by the use of network.

Network transparency, allowing an application to play back or record audio on a different machine than the one it is running on. Something as cool as it sounds: imagine you playing audio using someone else’s soundcard or to share a single microphone as an input between multiple PCs at the same time!

Support for multiple audio sources and sinks both locally and over the network – sound API abstraction, alleviating the need for multiple backends in applications to handle the wide diversity of sound systems out there.

For what we know some sound cards in windows has the problem with re-sampling and recommended way for sound/music playback is using software resample plug-ins for the player, but this solution is not system wide and will not work for every other applications – with PulseAudio, this is supposed to change: with built-in sample conversion and re-sampling capabilities, which is supposed to be good, and we might actually expect better quality sound from our system.

Generic hardware abstraction is there, giving the possibility of doing things like individual volumes per application – I had previously found this on some apps but with issues.

From my understanding, packages can replace the ESD package ‘ESounD’ entirely, creating a symbolic link to PulseAudio. With this in place, all applications that expect ESD are fooled into using PulseAudio automatically. So we can expect audio data from GStreamer>PulseAudio>ALSA Driver – It adds an extra layer right above the kernel-level hardware drivers, but with it you enjoy the benefit of all of your audio passing through the same sound server – wala! In fact, setting up ALSA to use PulseAudio in the middle without replacing major established sound architecture as a whole would make more applications to immediately take advantage of PulseAudio. We could look at PulseAudio as a proxy for your sound applications – allowing you to do highly advanced operations on your sound data as it passes between your application and your hardware (sounds simple).

Distributors like Red Hat and Ubuntu have already started to make PulseAudio available by default in their new releases – and why not? PulseAudio can account for 90% of the audio needs of a regular desktop Linux session. Everything and anything about PulseAudio can be found with details at: http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/AboutPulseAudio