No sound in Workrave

[papioara]

Hello, I use Workrave on my Linux Mint 19.3 Cinnamon machine, and it runs fine, but there is only one little flaw I do not understand: Workrave does not play any sound, whatever I choose in the user settings. Would you have an explanation for this behaviour and do you have a solution? Otherwise sound works on my system.

Best wishes

[snowman]

Same here.

When I FIRST hit the Play button of break-prelude.wav file, it did not have sound, play again, it has sound. or if the .wav file has much longer time, you could hear the remaining part of it without hit Play button twice (but starting part has no sound).

Break prompt sound event didn't has sound when dialog appear, other sounds are working correctly.

I think this is not an issue of workrave, when you try playing with other media players, same problem exists.

[azzamsa]

Same here. The strange thing is that it can play sound on my second machine. Which happen to be running on the same OS, Debian 11.

I suspect it has to do with the .wav files and alsa. So I do:

user in old in ~
❯ dpkg -l | grep pulse
ii  gstreamer1.0-pulseaudio:amd64                 1.18.4-2                         amd64        GStreamer plugin for PulseAudio (transitional package)
ii  libpulse-mainloop-glib0:amd64                 14.2-2                           amd64        PulseAudio client libraries (glib support)
ii  libpulse0:amd64                               14.2-2                           amd64        PulseAudio client libraries
ii  libpulsedsp:amd64                             14.2-2                           amd64        PulseAudio OSS pre-load library
ii  pulseaudio                                    14.2-2                           amd64        PulseAudio sound server
ii  pulseaudio-module-bluetooth                   14.2-2                           amd64        Bluetooth module for PulseAudio sound server
ii  pulseaudio-utils                              14.2-2                           amd64        Command line tools for the PulseAudio sound server

~ took 1m57s
❯ dpkg -l | grep pulse
ii  libpulse-mainloop-glib0:amd64                 14.2-2                          amd64        PulseAudio client libraries (glib support)
ii  libpulse0:amd64                               14.2-2                          amd64        PulseAudio client libraries
ii  libpulsedsp:amd64                             14.2-2                          amd64        PulseAudio OSS pre-load library
ii  pulseaudio                                    14.2-2                          amd64        PulseAudio sound server
ii  pulseaudio-utils                              14.2-2                          amd64        Command line tools for the PulseAudio sound server

You can spot that my new machine is missing the gstreamer1.0-pulseaudio which happens to be a:

GStreamer is a streaming media framework, based on graphs of filters which operate on media data. Applications using this library can do anything from real-time sound processing to playing videos, and just about anything else media-related. Its plugin-based architecture means that new data types or processing capabilities can be added simply by installing new plug-ins.

sudo apt install gstreamer1.0-pulseaudio solved my issue.

Now, I can hear if my rest time is done. Because I left my desk during a rest time.

Thanks for workrave.

---

Update:

I am curious why gstreamer1.0-pulseaudio not included as dependency or recommended package

[MJBlack9000]

I faced the same issue. Basically - Workrave has no sound on Arch Linux. gstreamer is listed as its dependency and was installed. However, inspecting the package with pacman -Qi workrave yielded this:

Optional Deps   : gst-plugins-good: to play sound events [installed]
                  gnome-panel: Applet for GNOME Panel
                  mate-panel: Applet for MATE Panel
                  xfce4-panel: Applet for Xfce4 Panel

I got the sounds when I installed gst-plugins-good. Also confused about it being an optional dependency. But it works!