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Raspberry Pi OS is moving to PulseAudio and away from Alsa

Jim Noggin

December 08, 2020 14:32

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• What does this mean for our current HiFiBerry setups that use Alsa?
• Is it ok to update Raspbian to the new release?

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7 comments

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  HiFiBerry team December 08, 2020 18:56

  The device driver layer is still ALSA. That's the only API that's available from the kernel. pulseaudio just puts another layer on top of this. While this makes sense in an UI environment with lots of concurrent programs or even users, for a simple player, it just adds complexity without any advantage. That's the reason we're not using it on HiFiBerryOS. 

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  Jim Noggin December 08, 2020 19:12

  Thank you for the fast response. Only considering the pulseaudio changes in the OS update, is it safe to run the update?

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  HiFiBerry team December 08, 2020 20:11

  If they did it right, there should no problem at all. There are other distributions using pulseaudio for a long time.
  In any case, a backup before any update is always a good idea.

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  Burnfield December 23, 2020 11:07

  Just in case someone stumbles on this thread from googling issues related to sound problems in the Raspberry OS update.

  I updated Raspberry OS and lost all sound output via Hifiberry DAC+DSP. Tried fixing /boot/config.txt, disabling onboard-sound and configured /etc/asound.conf. Nothing helped. Tried "aplay testfile.wav" as pi-user and got "card not defined" even though Hifiberry drivers were loaded and /etc/asound.conf was configured correctly.

  However when using root-user the sound was working! Turned out that when using pi-user, the asound configuration was loaded from pi-users /home/pi/.asoundrc. For some reason the card index was defined there as "-1" and obviously it was not defined. I changed the index correctly to "0" for the pi-user, and now sound was working across the board again. Hope this helps someone after upgrading the Raspberry OS kernel.

  Edited by Burnfield December 30, 2020 15:08
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  HiFiBerry team December 23, 2020 14:12

  Thanks for sharing this information.

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  Robin48gx April 27, 2021 07:33

  I just did an update and now have no sound on a pi4 DAC+

   

  pi@raspberrypiXLRDAC:~ $ aplay -l
  aplay: device_list:272: no soundcards found...
   

   

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  HiFiBerry team April 27, 2021 12:51

  This has nothing to do with Pulseaudio, but probably this:

  https://www.hifiberry.com/blog/configuration-changes-in-linux-5-4/