Failed to find mixer elements error after latest system update/upgrade. Kernel bumped to 4.19.118

Clyde

I just tested a freshly updated installation from the official image and found yet another effect that nobody seems to have reported before.

In addition to no sound after the update, I experienced system freezes every time I tried to browse through the games of any system. First, I suspected the video player, but further testing revealed that my Pi 4 froze every time when Emulation Station tried to play a sound, e.g. the navigation clicks when browsing games, or the various sounds it plays when you start a game (e.g. "Seeegaaa!", "It'seh me, Mario!", or "Playstation!").

With ENABLE NAVIGATION SOUNDS = OFF in Emulation Station's audio menu, the freezes disappeared.

Another thing that is seldom mentioned (I only read it once in this post by @mitu) is that you may have to set <string name="AudioDevice" value="PCM" /> to Headphone when using the 3.5mm audio jack. With this and snd-bcm2835.enable_compat_alsa=1 added to the /boot/cmdline.txt, my sound problems and freezes were gone, and I could re-enable the navigation sounds. 😅

Thanks all of you in this thread and especially @mitu for giving me the right puzzle pieces to finally have an up-to-date Retropie with working sound again!

mitu

@Clyde said in Failed to find mixer elements error after latest system update/upgrade. Kernel bumped to 4.19.118:

With ENABLE NAVIGATION SOUNDS = OFF in Emulation Station's audio menu, the freezes disappeared.

Well, that's something new. Thanks for testing this through.

Clyde

@mitu My pleasure (especially since it's working now). ☺️

And I can say with much certainty that it should have nothing to do with any tinkering by me. My "old" system was installed when I got my Pi 4 at the beginning of ~~June~~ May, and my new system just some days ago. I set up both of them nearly from scratch to get rid of any inherited waste. I only mounted my ~/RetroPie/roms directory from an external ssd, and (only in my first Pi 4 installation) copied my Custom Collections over from the Retropie of my Pi 3B.

Clyde

Oh, another thing I noticed: After rebooting with snd-bcm2835.enable_compat_alsa=1, even removing that line from cmdline.txt didn't made the problems reappear. So it seems that booting with this option changes something in … something(?) in a way that it fixes the audio permanently. 🤔

I have full backups from before and after the fixes, so I could re-enact my actions if needed.

lucifersan

@Clyde Hi Clyde, I resolved the sound issue with the line ```
snd-bcm2835.enable_compat_alsa=1

I also have resolved the issue prior adding that line by removing pulseaudio and resetting alsa configuration, but it resulted in loss of volume control in EmulationStation. No matter what combination of  Audio Card/Audio Device I use the volume went always back to 0%.
I'm using Supreme build by the way.
Also, after upgrading to 4.6.1 I lost atomiswave/naomi emulation. I will open a new thread about that.
Thanks

Clyde

@lucifersan Thanks for trying to help, but third-party builds are not supported here and are not much use for comparison with systems based on the official Retropie (like mine), since nobody but the third party knows what they changed in their build.

A good example for this is your tip about pulseaudio. PA is not part of the official Retropie image, so it definitely is not connected to most people's audio problems here.

movisman

I did a bit more testing with this, and for me, taking out snd-bcm2835.enable_compat_alsa=1 did break things again for me. Putting it back made things work.

However..... after some fiddling about, I have now made things work without the need for this line. I did do another OS update though, which updated things like the kernel and some other packages - so not sure if anything on that side has changed or improved in the last week, since the audio changes were first made to Pi OS.

It didn't work off the bat of course, but I followed the above tip of changing my es_settings.cfg to have the audio device as 'Headphone' rather than 'PCM' (PCM works when you use the compatibility line though, and is what i've been using up until now). Changing to 'Headphone' without the compatibility line still won't fix the sound in ES, unless you have directed all system audio to use headphones first.

As per:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/latest-raspberry-pi-os-update-may-2020/

Some people have asked how they can switch the audio output from the command line without using the desktop. To do this, you will need to create a file called .asoundrc in your home directory; ALSA looks for this file to determine which audio device it should use by default. If the file does not exist, ALSA uses “card 0” – which is HDMI – as the output device. If you want to set the headphone jack as the default output, create the .asoundrc file with the following contents:

defaults.pcm.card 1
defaults.ctl.card 1

This tells ALSA that “card 1” – the headphone jack – is the default device. To switch back to the HDMI output, either change the ‘1’s in the file to ‘0’s, or just delete the file.

The audio settings script creates this file when you explicitly select 'headphones' as your preferred option (configuration/tools > audiosettings) but uses different code.

Not sure how this is different (19 lines vs 2 lines above) - maybe the new OS update requires less code to achieve the same thing. Ultimately though either appears to work fine and will force the 3.5mm jack to be used as primary audio.

After a full reboot, sound works in ES when 'Headphone' is set as the audio device, and also sound is fine in games, which is what i'd expect. Not sure why I was struggling to get sound in games the other day, as my .asoundrc file was exactly the same as it is now and system audio was pointing to headphones. So that's a bit confusing. The only thing I can remember doing differently today was opening alsamixer via a console and selecting the headphone output, was just poking around. Can't see how this would do anything though. Need to play around more to try to identify all this behaviour I think.

But for now, everything works again without compatibility mode set in cmdline.txt. So will see how that goes!

Clyde

@Clyde said in Failed to find mixer elements error after latest system update/upgrade. Kernel bumped to 4.19.118:

Oh, another thing I noticed: After rebooting with snd-bcm2835.enable_compat_alsa=1, even removing that line from cmdline.txt didn't made the problems reappear.

@movisman said in Failed to find mixer elements error after latest system update/upgrade. Kernel bumped to 4.19.118:

I did a bit more testing with this, and for me, taking out snd-bcm2835.enable_compat_alsa=1 did break things again for me. Putting it back made things work.

So it may be that removing this line by me didn't break sound again because I also did set Headphone in the Retropie settings and es_settings.cfg. I'll test that hypothesis when I have the time, which, alas, may be not before friday.

Thanks for more pieces of this puzzle!

kikeminchas

@Clyde thanks for your suggestions. I'm also experiencing freezes when trying to navigate games. Not sure if the navigation sounds or the videos but you seemed to discard this last one. I have tried switching off the navigation sounds and various settings in this post and in the sticky one by mitu. Could you let me know , just to have them all in one place, all settings you have at the moment? I have followed mitu's advice so my settings in emulationstation.cfg are (using headphone out):

Audio Card: Default
Audio Device: Headphone
OMX Audio Device: ALSA

I also have the compatibility line in cmdline.txt: snd-bcm2835.enable_compat_alsa=1

Thanks!

alruf

@kikeminchas I wonder if something changed in a recent update as my arcade now freezes when I navigate the console menus and I reach Atari. The GUI freezes up and I am forced to reboot via SSH. The only changes I've made recently is to disable onboard audio in config.txt to fix an issue introduced by a recent update that caused the order of my audio cards to keep swapping (HDMI Audio, Headphone audio and usb card audio - latter two kept swapping places). I also overclocked the RPI4 to 1750. I am suspecting either the overclock or some update.

Clyde

@alruf said in Failed to find mixer elements error after latest system update/upgrade. Kernel bumped to 4.19.118:

I also overclocked the RPI4 to 1750. I am suspecting either the overclock or some update.

Just FYI, my Pi 4 wasn't overclocked when it froze reproducibly with Navigation Sounds = on until I applied the workarounds.

kikeminchas

OK, I managed to stop the freezes. First of all, I did another update, kernel and several other packages were updated (including ES) so this is for sure the first thing to do. I started all over again with the config changes. The main difference compared to what I had previously it's that I disabled the compatibility line in cmdline.txt. I then selected headphone as output both in ES and Retropie Audio Tools, rebooted and finally audio working both in ES and games and no freezes.

GreenGriffon

I can confirm similar findings. Today I burned a brand new RetroPie image (the Pi3 one), ran a full update, then loaded a handful of roms with video snaps.
Once the screensaver and/or previews kicked in, I started receiving the "Failed to find mixer elements" error, and the game videos had no sound in ES.
All I had to do was change the audio device to HDMI in ES, reboot, and then the sound was restored.
Clearly something is wrong with the default audio settings (is it PCM?).

Clyde

@GreenGriffon said in Failed to find mixer elements error after latest system update/upgrade. Kernel bumped to 4.19.118:

Clearly something is wrong with the default audio settings (is it PCM?).

See here for a detailed summary of the currently know details and workarounds for this issue by @mitu.

vpelss

These steps worked for me. Pi 4.

snd-bcm2835.enable_compat_alsa=1 in /boot/cmdline.txt
ran emultionstation-setup script and selected Headphones
in emulation station I set:
Audio Card : default
Audio Device : master
Omx Player: Local

No I get sound through my external speakers + I have the mixer working in emulationstation

2Play

For those having same with latest OS Dec updates and Pulse Audio:

go to ES Sound Settings and change from DEFAULT to SYSDEFAULT with PCM

Now sound will be ok and sound bar will work again

Colosso25

@vpelss said in Failed to find mixer elements error after latest system update/upgrade. Kernel bumped to 4.19.118:

These steps worked for me. Pi 4.

snd-bcm2835.enable_compat_alsa=1 in /boot/cmdline.txt

ran emultionstation-setup script and selected Headphones

in emulation station I set:
Audio Card : default
Audio Device : master
Omx Player: Local

No I get sound through my external speakers + I have the mixer working in emulationstation

I registered just to give a heads up to this solution.

I too was affected by the "failed to find mixer elements" nag error before running a rom.
There are a LOT of forum post about this issue, all with different solution with mixed results.

This solution worked for me too on my Pi 3B+
Installed RetroPie on top op Raspian
I want the audio from the headphone jack, not HDMI

snd-bcm2835.enable_compat_alsa=1 in /boot/cmdline.txt
selected Headphones in RetroPie Setup
selected ALSA in Raspi-Config

in emulation station I set:

Audio Card : default
Audio Device : master
Omx Player: ALSA

Clyde

@colosso25 Did you encounter any random "stops" for 1-2 seconds of the system? Because that's what me and some others experienced using the headphone jack. The only solution that we found was to use HDMI sound.

mitu

@clyde This issue seems relevant - https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/4610. Try using audio_pwm_mode=1 in config.txt and see how it works.

Colosso25

@clyde said in Failed to find mixer elements error after latest system update/upgrade. Kernel bumped to 4.19.118:

@colosso25 Did you encounter any random "stops" for 1-2 seconds of the system? Because that's what me and some others experienced using the headphone jack. The only solution that we found was to use HDMI sound.

No, not that I know of. I haven't been testing stuff out at that time. I was looking for a solution to this problem.