Linux No sound while using USB Headset

Surlent

Terrarian
OS is Ubuntu 15.04. I'm using PulseAudio.

Problem
There is no sound being emitted by the game, as demonstrated by pavucontrol(1), when my Creative Fatal1ty USB Headset is "on"; in such a condition, the game also refuses to close and hangs indefinitely. Should I disable the headset in pavucontrol and enable my on-board sound only, sound is demonstrably playing, both audibly and as shown in pavucontrol; the game also terminates normally. I have tried other combinations as well as enabling simultaneous broadcast, but to no avail.

What I've checked
I have sound in all other programs on my system through the headset. I believe I have verified that it should not be intrinsically Mono breaking the sound, as a simple sound-playing program garnered from https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.c...oundplayer-to-work-or-is-there-an-alternative plays a given WAV file with no difficulty through the headset. I'm not 100% certain if this is in any way comparable to Terraria's sound routines, but I'm willing to learn enough to compare or test if needed. Additionally, I've also tried purging all Mono-related packages from the system to no effect as well as re-installing libraries for PulseAudio and OpenAL. I have also re-named the Terraria data folder to force a configuration reset and also tried verifying the files with Steam; this, incidentally, informed me that 9000+ files were corrupt and would have to be re-downloaded (the game directory has less than 120 files total) and it seemed to take an unusually long time relative to other Steam games. Aside from sound issues, the game appears to run normally, however.

Dumps
The game does not appear to actually crash, but here's the terminal output. This part is common:

Code:
Setting breakpad minidump AppID = 105600
Steam_SetMinidumpSteamID:  Caching Steam ID:  76561198000696825 [API loaded no]
Dongle firmware /home/surlent/.local/share/Steam/linux64/../controller_base/d0ggle.bin loaded, version 1435869091.
OpenGL Device: GeForce GTX 760/PCIe/SSE2
OpenGL Driver: 4.5.0 NVIDIA 346.59
OpenGL Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
MojoShader Profile: glsl120
Using EXT_swap_control_tear VSync!
Controller 0: Logitech F310 Gamepad (XInput)
Using EXT_swap_control_tear VSync!
Resolution changed to: 800x600.
Using EXT_swap_control_tear VSync!

Here is where I changed my PA profile once, breaking the stream, and getting a new message:
Code:
AL lib: (EE) ALCpulsePlayback_streamStateCallback: Received stream failure!

And here is where I quit the game; this message or a close variant stays indefinitely if the game hangs.
Code:
AL lib: (WW) FreeDevice: (0x298fc30) Deleting 39 Buffer(s)
AL lib: (WW) FreeDevice: (0x298fc30) Deleting 1 Filter(s)

If anything else I can do would be helpful, please let me know.
 
I had a similar problem in the past while recording on my Logitech USB Headset, the sound would be turned up more than enough, but no sound would come from the game, as soon as I plugged in my other headset into the headphone jack, everything worked fine. However I run off of Windows 10.
 
This sounds like a post best made in Tech Support; I'm going to move it there.
Understandable. My logic was that it seemed more likely to be a bug in Terraria itself at this point than anything else given that the headset works elsewhere, but it's a tough call.

I had a similar problem in the past while recording on my Logitech USB Headset, the sound would be turned up more than enough, but no sound would come from the game, as soon as I plugged in my other headset into the headphone jack, everything worked fine. However I run off of Windows 10.

Interesting idea, though it doesn't seem to work here. Testing it did remind me that I have regular earbuds, so that solves my problem of not wanting to bother my room-mates, though I am still very much wanting to get to the bottom of this issue.
 
For me Terraria always uses the first available playback device in PulseAudio (system audio manager) and won't attach to anything else (changing default playback device does not work, nor does trying to manually move it to another soundcard [using "PulseAudio Volume Control"/`pavucontrol`]). For me that effectively means NO AUDIO in Terraria since the first playback device on my system is unfortunately my laptop's HDMI audio output.

You guys probably have a similar problem? Please check since USB audio devices are, to my knowledge, always considered separate playback devices by the system.
 
I think I've figured out this issue, and I think it's worth a necro-bump. It finally hit me while playing around with OpenArena and Dhewm3: neither one had sound either, and I realised that they both had OpenAL in common; on further inspection, it seems Terraria uses it too, though I don't seem to see an obvious indication of that.

At any rate, in Ubuntu at least, OpenAL had previously had a reputation for being horribly broken, so I did some research into it and found that the fault largely came from PulseAudio integration. I installed "alsoft-conf" from universe, and used it to disable the PulseAudio back-end, leaving only ALSA. All of a sudden, all three games have sound without shenanigans. Hopefully that's helpful to someone other than myself.
 
Necro bump

Great find Surient. It's possible to get OpenAL to play with pulseaudio well. The problem is that by default OpenAL will not allow you to switch audio sinks. You can edit the open al config to allow this (see PulseAudio - ArchWiki).

Now I have the sound working on any audio output!
 
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