Author Topic: pi4 No Sound at all in Attract mode but ok in games (FIXED)  (Read 5860 times)

scenariol113

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Re: pi4 No Sound at all in Attract mode but ok in games (FIXED)
« Reply #15 on: February 17, 2021, 07:33:37 PM »
Just a heads up.  I was messing around with the clock settings on my pi 4 8gb and updated the firmware.  When the pi rebooted I had the same exact problem with AM and no sound.  All the sound worked just like described in this thread except for AM.
I fixed it by reinstalling my backup.  I have no explanation for why or if this may even only affect my particular pi but either way this is what happened.

Thank again


FV

mlcampbe

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Re: pi4 No Sound at all in Attract mode but ok in games (FIXED)
« Reply #16 on: February 24, 2021, 06:10:17 AM »
I believe I know what is causing the sound not to work. Apparently there was a change in how the raspbian OS handles sound. See https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/new-raspberry-pi-os-release-december-2020/ for some more details. But, in summary the Dec 2020 raspbian release changed the sound server from ALSA to PulseAudio. I understand there are some good reason for them doing that but it seems to have broken audio from AM for some reason.

In my case I decided to download a raspbian lite image from https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspbian_lite/images/. I specifically took the 2/14/2020 release which still uses the ALSA sound server. This image works perfectly for me. I will note though that you can't upgrade the OS as it will install the PulseAudio sound system which will likely break AM sound again.

In my research I ran across an article somewhere that said you could remove the pulseaudio packages and everything woud default back to alsa. Another option was to add some parameters to the /boot/cmdline.txt file to re-enable alsa compatability too. I didn't try either of these options though so I don't know if they will work or not.