1y ago

cannot play audio on a fresh installed debian 12 xfce

I don't know if I didn't install non free firmware. Pavucontrol is installed. If I type alsa on a terminal it returns: bash: alsa: command not found.

ETA: turns out I only had to update the system

5 comments

There isn't an alsa command on my system either, so that's no surprise. But we'll need more information to track down the cause, such as:
What (sound) hardware are you using? (try lspci | grep Audio)
What happens when you try to play a sound? Does it get stuck loading / at 0:00, show an error, or just play silently?
Is your system using pulseaudio directly, or via pipewire? (try pactl info)
What shows up in pavucontrol? (Is it detecting your speaker, or just "dummy output"? Is sound muted, and can you unmute?) Try also alsamixer.
If you installed non-free firmware, you should have a few lines like deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ bookworm main contrib non-free-firmware in the file /etc/apt/sources.list. If non-free-firmware is not present, then obviously you have no non-free firmware.
the default is pipewire now so you may need to install the alsa pipewire module
Make sure you have package alsa-utils installed and try to run alsamixer. That'll show all the audio devices your system detects. Maybe you're lucky and it's just that some volume control is muted and if you're not it'll give you at least some info to work with. Majority of audio devices don't need any additional firmware to work and they almost always work out of the box just fine. What's the hardware you're running? Maybe it is something exotic which isn't installed by default (which I doubt).
And additionally, what you're trying to play audio from? For example MP3's need non-free codecs to be installed and without them your experience is "a bit" limited on audio side of things.
Fam, with all due respect, reconsider how you go about interacting with the community for support.
We love to help, so don't get me wrong. But you have to allow us to help you. Paramount with this is communication; so consider responding to questions asked by those who reach out to help.
Like, I'm not exaggerating when I say that your issues would have already been resolved if you had been (more) responsive.
In such cases on Debian, as root, I try my "lazy" approach
apt install vlc mplayer vorbis-tools ffmpeg mpv
which may pull in the needed codecs to play mp3, ogg and flac files. Does playing a video in your browser work btw ?