On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 1:43 PM, Valmor de Almeida <val.gentoo@gmail.com>wrote:
<snip>

I think I am getting close. My video player is vlc and I reemerged with
> alsa support; that pulled only the relevant alsa packages. Then
> downloaded a flv video and played; no sound. But got some clue.
>
>
First off - do you have PulseAudio running? If so, for HW/ALSA testing
purposes, shut it down. Second, check your mixer settings to determine if
your volume levels are appropriate. A great quick CLI app for this is
alsamixer (media-sound/alsa-utils) - first start the alsasound service (sudo
/etc/init.d/alsasound start), then run alsamixer - set your volumes to about
80%, and unmute all channels (use the 'm' key to toggle mute), then restart
the alsasound service to save your volume levels (sudo /etc/init.d/alsasound
restart), then add the alsasound service to your boot runlevel (sudo
rc-update add alsasound boot). This will set it up to restore these volume
levels on every startup (it will also save your *current* volume levels on
every shutdown, so don't mute, shutdown, and expect to be unmuted after
starting back up).

Now, double-check that PulseAudio is not running (ps -elf | grep -i pulse),
and kill it if it is.

Then run:

aplay /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front_Center.wav

If you hear sound - great, ALSA and your sound HW are working, and Flash
audio will almost certainly start magically working. If not, please post the
output of:

aplay -l
aplay -L

(both of those are L, first one lower case, second upper)

HTH-

James