Sound stopped working after a few hours.

Eggman

I hooked up my Raspberry Pi 3b+ yesterday. Installed Retropie 4.4.

I copied roms over and booted up and I was able to play them perfectly. Everything worked including video, sound etc.

I had a large PSX file I wanted to copy over. So I put in on a USB stick, plugged it in, and left it running for a few hours.

Came back after and discovered the sound had stopped working.

I followed a number of links and enabled various things:
hdmi_drive=2
hdmi_force_hotplug=1
hdmi_force_edid_audio=1

Sound still wasn't working.

I tried a fresh install of retropie 4.4. Still no sound.

I tried a card with Raspbian and verified that I can get sound out of the Pi (Just watched some Youtube videos).

Trying to figure out what the next step might be? Why would the sound work for a while and then suddenly quit?

Any help is appreciated.

mitu

Stupid question, but have you tried turning the volume up ?

Eggman

Yes. Volume is at max, both on the TV and in the Sound settings for Retropie.

mitu

@eggman What sound device do you have selected as default ? What does aplay -l shows on the command line ?

Eggman

Hmm...Okay. Just added a setting for:

dtparam=audio=on

Rebooted.

Sound seems to be working now. Question is whether it will stay that way. Did it start working because I added that setting? Or is it just something that works sometimes, but not others?

I guess time will tell.

Eggman

@mitu

card 0: ALSA [bcm2835 ALSA], device 0: bcm2835 ALSA [bcm2835 ALSA]
Subdevices: 7/7
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
Subdevice #1: subdevice #1
Subdevice #2: subdevice #2
Subdevice #3: subdevice #3
Subdevice #4: subdevice #4
Subdevice #5: subdevice #5
Subdevice #6: subdevice #6
card 0: ALSA [bcm2835 ALSA], device 1: bcm2835 ALSA [bcm2835 IEC958/HDMI]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: Controller [Wireless Controller], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

Hmmm...Is it possible that the issue had something to do with using a Playstation Controller and the fact that it is actually potentially an audio device as well? Maybe sometimes it selects the wrong audio output?

mitu

The default RetroPie image has dtparam=audio=on by default in the /boot/config.txt, so if it was not there, then maybe you're using another image (?).
About the other sound card detected - USB wireless - that might be the culprit, but you can choose which one is the default in ES and in raspi-config.

Eggman

@mitu Hmmm...You are right. Just double checked my config. dtparam=audio=on is definitely there. I just duplicated it.

So it's unlikely that had anything to do with it.

In case this happens again, how can I ensure it uses the correct audio output in ES? What is the correct configuration for it to use HDMI always?

mitu

@eggman I think you can force a specific order for the sound cards through configuration, described in this Archlinux wiki page. You just need to know the name of the sound kernel modules loaded, but that's easy - you look in /proc/asound/modules:

pi@retropie:~ $ cat /proc/asound/modules
 0 snd_bcm2835

This means the 1st soundcard (index=0) is controlled by the onboard PI sound chip, with the kernel module called snd_bcm2835. Your output will have 2 sound modules loaded, so you can note the name of the USB wireless sound kernel module and create a file ( /etc/modprobe.d/0-sound.conf) with 2 lines:

options snd_bcm2835 index=0
 options <NAME_OF_THE_2ND_SOUND_MODULE> index=1

Ideally you can try to replicate the problem - sound routed to the wireless card - then see if applying this configuration fixes the problem.