Playback not working on Linux package

• Apr 18, 2016 - 21:08

I installed the package "musescore" on to my computer, running Debian 8 (SteamOS with access to desktop). Everything seems to be working except that anything related to playback is greyed out. I tried installing another soundfont (fluid-soundfont-gs) and a synthesizer (fluidsynth), but to no avail. Please advise


Comments

I know nothing about SteamOS, but if the setup is anything like the way ChromeOS allows Linux to run in a chroot environment, then there may well be some special hacks you need to get audio fully working. I take it *other* audio programs are working? With ChromeOS, I found I need to fiddle with the ownership and/or permissions on /dev/snd/seq to get MuseScore sound working even when other programs worked out of the box. There is also a service called "cras" that ChromeOS uses to help manage audio, and at some point I may have had to do something with my ALSA configuration to talk to cras. Not sure any of that will help, but it may at least give you something to investigate.

Also, what version of MuseScore (Help / About)?

In reply to by pokemonPasta

ChromeOS is built on some sort of Linux kernel, but aside from that, I know fsr less than what you find in a Google search, so I'll leave it at that.

Unfortunately, the details are goong to differ from system, so what I did is unlikely to work for you. For me, the main key is to make sure I have write permissions on /dev/snd/seq, so that would be th first thing to try. Do an "ll" of it, and if you don't see "w" for owner, group, and other, do a chmod a+w to get it that way. It's possible the ownership is wrong too, but that's going to totally depend on your system configuration - what groups your user id belpngs to, etc. and it's entirely possible it will turn out to be something different. But in any case, as I said, hopefully this gives you some things to Google on. Sounds like your configuration is not the usual Linux, which is fine, but it meams you will probably have to do a lot of the legwork on your own to figure out how to get things working. Whatever is preventing MuseScpre from getting sound is presumably preventing other applications that use the same audio system from getting sound, so you'll want to hunt through the SteamOS forums etc for clues.

BTW, 1.3 is ancient - four years old, now, I think? If that's the msot recent package available for your distribution, that is not a good sign for that distribution. But you might have better luck goong to the Downloads page on this site and getting the curremt AppImage version.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

I didn't understand a word you said in the second paragraph, so I'm going to assume it's different

I'll see if I can find a better musescore than the 1.3 I have

EDIT: Ok, I looked at the downloads page again, and I didn't notice the AppImage. Download it, guess what version? 2.0.3. Playback works fine now

In former times I had to start timidity++ from the terminal first to have midi playback on my system (Opensuse Linux), but I don't believe this really will be the solution.

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