Weird sound issues. Sound works on Kodi but doesn't anywhere else.

chazer

The odd thing is Kodi does identify my display port, while batocera only has the 3.5mm jack and hdmi

Kodi identifies the sound as HDA ATI, BNQ BenQ EW3270I on DisplayPort #2
Batocera looks at hardware audio as follows:
HDMI0 HDMI [HDA ATI HDMI]
HDMI1 HDMI [HDA ATI HDMI]
HDMI2 HDMI [HDA ATI HDMI]
ALC221 Analog Generic [HD-Audio Generic]

My chipset information is as follows, according to batocera:
CPU Model A12-9800E Radeon R7, 12 Compute Cores 4C+8G
CPU Feature avx2

When I go to the Alt+ctrl+F4 sound module, only ALC221 Analog Generic [HD-Audio Generic] presents the sound bars when pressing F5. HDMI0 doesn’t present anything at all when pressing F5. No Display Port option appears as part of the hardware.

If I select one of the HDMI in Batocera, I have no ability to increase the volume.

Has anyone encountered this and is there any solution for it?

Thank you in advance for your help!

joinski

chazer

After you choose “HDA ATI, BNQ BenQ EW3270I on DisplayPort #2” in Kodi, do you have sound within kodi?
If yes, you should just exit kodi and choose “HDMI2 HDMI [HDA ATI HDMI]” in Batocera ES Menu and then hear a “jingle-Sound” when you exit Sound Settings in Batocera.
When you then start a game, you should have sound.

tgx

chazer YESSSSSSS!!! Thank you so much for this post and also kudos to the original poster. I had the exact same issue.
I am a total noob at this and was pulling my hair out for days. i wonder why Kodi and Emulation Station are getting different hardware probe results? In my case it was an nVidia GTX 7XX series and an Dell Optiplex Intel based board. Sounds would always come out of the speaker or my VR headset(USB) but not over HDMI.

chazer

joinski Thank you for the quick response!

Well… it is a bit odd because the plugins within Kodi do play with sound in them, some of the system sounds do not at times.

When I leave Kodi though, I get no sound, not even from HDMI2. When I try to increase the volume, it will not stay at whatever volume setting I put it on. It reverts back to 0.

CH3rn0b0q

joinski
chazer

I think I found a solution for people having issues with sound over HDMI in Emulationstation only but working fine in Kodi.

Go to Kodi

Setting>System>Audio
Select “Audio Output Devices”
Now on the device listing, count from the top to the bottom (First Device listed is #0, the second is #1 … and so on)
Remember which # your working device is (I will use #4 in this example)

Now exit Kodi

Go to Emulationstation.
Open ‘batocera.conf’ over Network
Go to line 59 “Audio”

Change on Line 61:
audio.device=x,x
To:
audio.device=x,4

If your working device in Kodi is at #5 change to audio.device=x,5

After you made a change save your config file and check at emulationstation if sound is working (restart your system).

If you find:
audio.device=0,3 HDMI 0 (for example)

And changing into 0,4 is not working, change the 0 to 1:
audio.device=1,4 HDMI 0

If the solution worked for you, you will find a new device listed under ‘System Settings>Audio Output’ in Emulationstation.
In my case when the sound started to work a new device appeared in the listing: ‘1.4 HDMI 0…’

It’s a weird solution, but surprisingly worked for me just perfect 😅

joinski

chazer
okay, then maybe this can help you?
https://wiki.batocera.org/doku.php?id=supported_hardware#ati_hdmi_audio_output

chazer

joinski Thank you once more.

I connected through SSH to the hard drive in which I have Batocera installed, but for the life of me, I can’t find a grub.cfg file anywhere.

Is there any alternative location in which radeon.audio=1 could potentially go to?

ninjaw

there is no grub, I found it with a very different name, however it’s on a regular small fat partition, so regular that I just need to plug my usb key on windows, you shouldn’t use SSH for a such basic hard drive use.
Also, just activating nvidia driver is supposed to do the trick, it was working for me before I update to last beta, now it refuses to activate nvidia whatever I do

ninjaw

I managed to get back sound, using a fresh new install. I activated nvidia, this time I created the whole usb key from RPI4/debian/linux looks like the (non existing) grub trick isn’t doing anything, on my recent PC I require the nvidia option and that’s all. Then the 5.25 stable upgraded to 5.26 beta and I still have sound. I didnt loose any setup since I’m booting on usb and using a folder on internal NTFS hard drive for all the batocera stuff.

realnoize

Hi guys, any ideas if my HDMI0 randomly changes from being card 1 and card 0?

Like, totally random. Sometimes Batocera boots up and the HDMI0 ID is hw:0,3, and sometimes it is hw:1,3. Obviously, this causes issues, as we never know if we’ll get sound or not. The other card it switches place with is the USB Audio driver (there’s no USB audio device connected anywhere). Those two seem to exchange ID order randomly at boot.

So setting it up in the batocera.conf file is totally useless for me, since those ID numbers are not always the same.

Trying to force the system in NOT loading the USB audio driver, or set the priorites of these devices, but so far, everything I tried don’t work. Tried using a .conf file in etc/modprobe.d/ or modifying the blacklist.conf but any change I do there are never saved and reset at every reboot as well.

Seriously interested if anyone has a solution to this.

hfog

I’m seeing similar behavior on my USB thumb drive. I’m using a wireless USB headset for audio and sound sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t and it appears to be quite random. I’ve tried forcing it to bind to a specific sound device but that only occasionally works.

What’s particularly maddening is that I can always get it to work in Kodi but everywhere else it’s a crap shoot. I would REALLY love to be able to change the selected sound device in Batocera’s main menus without needing to reboot (as we can in Kodi). Seems to me that would solve the problem of sound devices not always mounting with the same ordinal id

(which is what I suspect is causing this problem).

Hanappi

My webcam caused the issue with random Hardware-ID´s. Simple solution was, to unplug the webcam, as i dont need it often. Not very elegant, but somehow better than reboot several times. ;)