GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 572050
Sound stops working intermittently
Last modified: 2009-02-17 10:57:45 UTC
Steps to reproduce: 1. Play videos and/or music interchangebly with Opera/Firefox/xmms. 2. Sound stops working on all these programs. The sound settings window throws an error when testing the driver (ALSA). 3. Closing Opera and killing hung plugins will sometimes fix the problem for all programs. Xmms will always return with error. Stack trace: Error thrown by sound settings driver test: audiotestsrc wave=sine freq=512 ! audioconvert ! audioresample ! gconfaudiosink: Internal GStreamer error: state change failed. Xmms simply reports it can't open audio device. Other information:
Most likely a configuration/settings issue - make sure to set the audio output to a device that can be opened by multiple applications at the same time (e.g. alsa dmix), or use a sound server for output. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 471364 ***
Thank you for your quick answer. It is indeed possibly a configuration/settings issue since I'm in an environment with replicated machines, and other machines with the same hardware and software don't experience the problem. However I think the device can be opened by multiple applications, since after a reboot, when things appear to work fine, I've managed to have Opera, Firefox and Xmms all going at the same time with all sounds being mixed correctly. But then it suddenly stops working and no longer are multiple applications supported simultaneously.
Right, it was just my first guess. There might be another problem/error when opening the device. The primary bug here is that you don't get to see the proper error message of the underlying audiosink though, and get that generic 'state change failed' error message instead. You can run your application or gnome-sound-properties with GST_DEBUG=*:3 to see what the original error message of the sink is (ie. 'GST_DEBUG=*:5 gnome-sound-properties' in a shell). The error message thing has also been fixed in newer versions of gst-plugins-good, so maybe you could try upgrading your system first if problems persist.