Comment 26 for bug 301174

I had sound on a laptop that worked flawlessly (as I experienced) in intrepid, and upon installing jaunty, this behavior appeared. All of the solutions I've seen proposed are not fixes for this bug; blacklisting the pc speaker module, controlling the volume of the pc speaker in a mixer.

This bug is the following: I can set an alert sound to be played, I can pick an mp3 or wav in gnome-control-center, and upon triggering the alert sound, all I hear is a beep. I assumed that this is some sort of fall back behavior for when sound isn't installed or configured properly, especially considering, and here's the kicker, that I get absolutely no warning or error message from ubuntu upon trying to select an alert sound. As far as a user is concerned, their audio is working properly (I could still play music from rhythmbox, for example), but for a completely unknown reason, the alert sounds just don't play.

There are many duplicates for this bug which propose blacklisting the pc speaker or other such 'workarounds' or 'fixes' for this bug, none of which explain or address why my audio works in some applications, but some part of my system fails to play the alert sound.

If someone wants to point me to the bug where this issue is actually being addressed, maybe I'm in the wrong place. Every duplicate I can find, linked to this bug or not, all has the same 'resolution' listed, involving the pc speaker mixer or blacklisting the module completely, and to me, that is not a resolution for this issue. I've been attempting to coral all the users who are experiencing this issue to the same bug report, so that the developers can pin down why this happens, or at the very least explain that it's a fallback behavior, and that it can be caused by any number of issues with the user's installation, which have to be addressed one by one. Right now we have a default install of the ubuntu OS that leads users to believe that their audio is working, but gives them no indication or error message as to why it wont play their selected shutdown or alert sounds (among others?). To me that sounds like a bug. As I said before, I'm not even sure this bug has been assigned to the proper packages or projects. To me it seems highly unlikely that metacity and compiz suffer from the same exact issue and have the same exact fall back procedure. I haven't seen a single definitive response from anyone, developer or not, that explains when and why ubuntu chooses to play a beep instead of the alert sound defined in gnome-control-panel.