News

All news

New Raspberry Pi OS release — December 2020

Well, in a year as disrupted and strange as 2020, it’s nice to know that there are some things you can rely on, for example the traditional end-of-year new release of Raspberry Pi OS, which we launch today. Here’s a run-through of the main new features that you’ll find in it.

Chromium

We’ve updated the Chromium browser to version 84. This has taken us a bit longer than we would have liked, but it’s always quite a lot of work to get our video hardware acceleration integrated with new releases of the browser. That’s done now, so you should see good-quality video playback on sites like YouTube. We’ve also, given events this year, done a lot of testing and tweaking on video conferencing clients such as Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom, and they should all now work smoothly on your Raspberry Pi’s Chromium.

There’s one more thing to mention on the subject of web browsers. We’ve been shipping Adobe’s Flash Player as part of our Chromium install for several years now. Flash Player is being retired by Adobe at the end of the year, so this release will be the last that includes it. Most websites have now stopped requiring Flash Player, so this hopefully isn’t something that anyone notices!

PulseAudio

From this release onwards, we are switching Raspberry Pi OS to use the PulseAudio sound server.

First, a bit of background. Audio on Linux is really quite complicated. There are multiple different standards for handling audio input and output, and it does sometimes seem that what has happened, historically, is that whenever anyone wanted to use audio in Linux, they looked at the existing libraries and programs and went “Hmmm… I don’t like that, I’ll write something new and better.” This has resulted in a confused mass of competing and conflicting software, none of which quite works the way anyone wants it to!

The most common audio interface, which lies underneath most Linux systems somewhere, is called ALSA, the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture. This is a fairly reliable low-level audio interface — indeed, it is what Raspberry Pi OS has used up until now — but it has quite a lot of limitations and is starting to show its age. For example, it can only handle one input and one output at a time. So for example, if ALSA is being used by your web browser to play sound from a YouTube video to the HDMI output on your Raspberry Pi, nothing else can produce sound at the same time; if you were to try playing a video or an audio file in VLC, you’d hear nothing but the audio from YouTube. Similarly, if you want to switch the sound from your YouTube video from HDMI to a USB sound card, you can’t do it while the video is playing; it won’t change until the sound stops. These aren’t massive problems, but most modern operating systems do handle audio in a more flexible fashion.

More significant is that ALSA doesn’t handle Bluetooth audio at all, so various other extensions and additional bits of software are required to even get audio into and out of Bluetooth devices on an ALSA-based system. We’ve used a third-party library called bluez-alsa for a few years now, but it’s an additional piece of code to maintain and update, so this isn’t ideal.

PulseAudio deals with all of this. It’s a piece of software that sits as a layer between all the audio hardware and all the applications that send and receive audio, and it automatically routes everything to the right places. It can mix the audio from multiple applications together, so you can hear VLC at the same time as YouTube, and it allows the output to be moved around between different devices while it is playing. It knows how to talk to Bluetooth devices, and it greatly simplifies the job of managing default input and output devices, so it makes it much easier to make sure audio ends up where it is supposed to be!

One area where it is particularly helpful is in managing audio input and output streams to web browsers like Chromium; in our testing, the use of PulseAudio made setting up video conferencing sessions much easier and more reliable, particularly with Bluetooth headsets and webcam audio.

The good news for Raspberry Pi users is that, if we’ve got it right, you shouldn’t even notice the change. PulseAudio now runs by default, and while the volume control and audio input/output selector on the taskbar looks almost identical to the one in previous releases of the OS, it is now controlling PulseAudio rather than ALSA. You can use it just as before: select your output and input devices, adjust the volume, and you’re good to go.

There is one small change to the input/output selector, which is the menu option at the bottom for Device Profiles. In PulseAudio, any audio device has one or more profiles, which select which outputs and inputs are used on any device with multiple connections. (For example, some audio HATs and USB sound cards have both analogue and digital outputs — there will usually be a profile for each output to select where the audio actually comes out.)

Profiles are more important for Bluetooth devices. If a Bluetooth device has both an input and an output (such as a headset with both a microphone and an earphone), it usually supports two different profiles. One of these is called HSP (HeadSet Profile), and this allows you to use both the microphone and the earphone, but with relatively low sound quality — equivalent to that you hear on a mobile phone call, so fine for speech but not great for music. The other profile is called A2DP (Advanced Audio Distribution Profile), which gives much better sound quality, but is output-only: it does not allow you to use the microphone. So if you are making a call, you want your Bluetooth device to use HSP, but if you are listening to music, you want it to use A2DP.

We’ve automated some of this, so if you select a Bluetooth device as the default input, then that device is automatically switched to HSP. If you want to switch a device which is in HSP back to A2DP, just reselect it from the output menu. Its microphone will then be deactivated, and it will switch to A2DP. But sometimes you might want to take control of profiles manually, and the Device Profiles dialog allows you to do that.

(Note that if you are only using the Raspberry Pi’s internal sound outputs, you don’t need to worry about profiles at all, as there is only one, and it’s automatically selected for you.)

Some people who have had experience of PulseAudio in the past may be a little concerned by this change, because PulseAudio hasn’t always been the most reliable piece of software, but it has now reached the point where it solves far more problems than it creates, which is why many other Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu, now use it by default. Most users shouldn’t even notice the change; there may be occasional issues with some older applications such as Sonic Pi, but the developers of these applications will hopefully address any issues in the near future.

Printing

One thing which has always been missing from Raspberry Pi OS is an easy way to connect to and configure printers. There is a Linux tool for this, called CUPS, the Common Unix Printing System. (It’s actually owned by Apple and is the underlying printing system used by macOS X, but it is still free software and available for use by Linux distributions.)

CUPS has always been available in apt, so could be installed on any Raspberry Pi, but the standard web-based interface is a bit unfriendly. Various third-party front-end tools have been written to make CUPS a bit easier to use, and we have decided to use one called system-config-printer. (Like PulseAudio, this is also used as standard by Ubuntu.)

So both CUPS and system-config-printer are now installed as part of Raspberry Pi OS. If you are a glutton for punishment, you can access the CUPS web interface by opening the Chromium browser and going to http://localhost:631, but instead of doing that, we suggest just going into the Preferences section in the main menu and opening Print Settings.

This shows the system-config-printer dialog, from which you can add new printers, remove old ones, set one as the default, and access the print queue for each printer, just as you should be familiar with from other operating systems.

Like most things in Linux, this relies on user contributions, so not every printer is supported. We’ve found that most networked printers work fine, but USB printers are a bit hit-and-miss as to whether there is a suitable driver; in general, the older your printer is, the more likely it is to have a CUPS driver available. The best thing to do is to try it and see, and perhaps ask for help on our forums if your particular printer doesn’t seem to work.

This fills in one of the last things missing in making Raspberry Pi a complete desktop computer, by making it easy to set up a printer and print from applications such as LibreOffice.

Accessibility

One of the areas we have tried to improve in the Desktop this year is to make it more accessible to those with visual impairments. We added support for the Orca screen reader at the start of the year, and the display magnifier plugin over the summer.

While there are no completely new accessibility features this time, we have made some improvements to Orca support in applications like Raspberry Pi Configuration and Appearance Settings, to make them read what they are doing in a more helpful fashion; we’ve also worked with the maintainers of Orca to raise and fix a few bugs. It’s still not perfect, but we’re doing our best!

One of the benefits of switching to PulseAudio is that it now means that screen reader audio can be played through Bluetooth devices; this was not possible using the old ALSA system, so visually-impaired users who wish to use the screen reader with a Bluetooth headset or external speaker can now do so.

One feature we have added is an easy way to install Orca; it is still available through Recommended Software as before, but given that is not easy to navigate for a visually-impaired person, there is now a keyboard shortcut: just hold down ctrl and alt and press the space bar to automatically install Orca. A dialog box will be shown on the screen, and voice prompts will let you know when the install has started and finished.

And if you can’t remember that shortcut, when you first boot a new image, if you don’t do anything for thirty seconds or so, the startup wizard will now speak to you to remind you how to do it…

Finally, we had hoped to be able to say that Chromium was now compatible with Orca; screen reader support was being added to versions 8x. Unfortunately, for now this seems to only have been added for Windows and Mac versions, not the Linux build we use. Hopefully Google will address this in a future release, but for now if you need a web browser compatible with Orca, you’ll need to install Firefox from apt.

New hardware options

We’ve added a couple of options to the Raspberry Pi Configuration tool.

On the System tab, if you are running on Raspberry Pi with a single status LED (i.e. a Raspberry Pi Zero or the new Raspberry Pi 400), there is now an option to select whether the LED just shows that the power is on, or if it flickers off to show drive activity.

LED control in Raspberry Pi Configuration

On the Performance tab, there are options to allow you to control the new Raspberry Pi Case Fan: you can select the GPIO pin to which it is connected and set the temperature at which it turns on and off.

Fan controls in Raspberry Pi Configuration

How do I get it?

The latest image can be installed on a new card using the Raspberry Pi Imager, or can be downloaded from our Downloads page.

To apply the updates to an existing image, you’ll need to enter the usual commands in a terminal window:

sudo apt update
sudo apt full-upgrade

(It is safe to just accept the default answer to any questions you are asked during the update procedure.)

Then, to install the PulseAudio Bluetooth support, you will need to enter the following commands in the terminal window:

sudo apt purge bluealsa
sudo apt install pulseaudio-module-bluetooth

Now reboot.

To swap over the volume and input selector on the taskbar from ALSA to PulseAudio, after your Raspberry Pi has restarted, right-click a blank area on the taskbar and choose Add / Remove Panel Items. Find the plugin labelled Volume Control (ALSA/BT) in the list, select it and click Remove; then click the Add button, find the plugin labelled Volume Control (PulseAudio) and click Add. Alternatively, just open the Appearance Settings application from the Preferences section of the Main Menu, go to the Defaults tab and press one of the Set Defaults buttons.

Updates

Some people have reported that some applications are ignoring the effect of the PulseAudio output switcher. This is probably caused by an old ALSA configuration file still being on the system. Once you have updated, execute the following in a terminal window, which should fix this:

rm ~/.asoundrc

To remove the old Audio Preferences application, which will not work with PulseAudio, do:

sudo apt purge pimixer

We are also aware that the output from the Raspberry Pi’s internal audio device is in mono in the image; this is now fixed. To get the fix, do an update in a terminal window:

sudo apt update
sudo apt full-upgrade
reboot

Some users have reported that in a dual-monitor setup, switching the audio output to the AV Jack causes problems – this is being investigated at the moment.

As ever, do let us know what you think in the comments.

412 comments

Thanks for this update – looks good. I’ve asked my seedbox to start sharing these files – hopefully it helps reduce your bandwidth demands.

I note that the arm64 images haven’t (yet) been updated. Are these updates in the works?

ARM64 images will contain an extra change, so they’ve been delayed a bit. No ETA at this time.

I did the 64-bit upgrade just now, and it did the upgrade, it installed PulseAudio (the volume level is way too low on HDMI ‘analog’ output, it was fine before), but it’s only Chromium 83, which I expect is the hold-up.

Monitor is 100%, speakers are at a decent level, Pi is at 100% outputting to ‘HDMI’, YouTube is 100%, it’s very very quiet.

Turns out that I need to run ‘alsamixer’ and select bcm2835 HDMI 1 sound card, and then it showed that alsamixer had a very low audio volume, and ramping that up fixed the issue.

Could be a common upgrade problem?

Thanks Sykobee. Worked for me. How far did you ramp up the bcm2835 HDMI 1 volume?

Glad that was of help!

80% – felt about right to me, but I’m sure it doesn’t matter and it’s how you feel the audio sounds reasonable – I share the monitor/speakers with another computer so I roughly balanced it to be similar to that one’s audio output without changing the speaker volume.

Thank you! I’m happy again with my Pi.

Awesome!
Is there an ETA for the 64bit image yet?

He just replied to Ben that there’s no ETA……

Great to see these updates! Looks like the people over at Pi towers have been busy. Merry Christmas :)

Thanks, has the Raspberry Pi for Desktop and Mac been updated also ?

It hasn’t been, but it’s near the top of the todo list.

When do we get an official widevine support for chromium? I really dislike having to download a second browser just to listen to Spotify or watch Netflix.

widevine is not redistributable, so it’s not something we can do anything about. There are plenty of tools out there to add widevine support to the browser we ship. Botspot’s pi-apps, for example, has that option.

Technically, when you install Chromium Media Edition or Chromium Widevine (both are basically the same thing), you are not installing a second browser. Instead, the script adds the armhf ChromeOS widevine library to your existing Chromium. Also, it adds a new menu launcher that makes websites think you’re using a Chromebook.

Great to see how the desktop experience is being so thoughtfully curated. Is there a practical way to reduce the lag and latency we see even when using the top-end RPi4 with an SSD? For this reason I run all my RPis headless without a UI.

Lag and latency of what exactly? Also one usually needs UI to do something desktop related (e.g. play youtube video and edit some document meanwhile). Or one does not need it (server) so it can be stopped. But how do I ‘run headless to reduce lag’? Either the UI is used and cannot be stopped or it is not used and then does not produce extra lag when idle or can be stopped.

Or do you mean that just running 3 linux terminals in GUI taxes your pi4 so much that you stop X and run 3 consoles and switch via ALT-F1,F2,F3? Really? On Zero maybe.

It’s possible he’s using VNC, which has a lot of lag. Compared that with ssh that has no lag. A work-around is to use ssh -X for running GUI apps remotely. It uses more bandwidth compared to VNC, but less laggy.

Check your USB to SATA cable. I bought a couple of cheap ones off of Amazon, they only ran at USB2 speed, dead slow! I already had an alternative better quality lead. I it must faster and noticeably faster than MicroSD

Remote desktop with minimal lag? I use xrdp with remmina, works better than ssh -X or vnc, IMHO.

What about NoMachine (NX), also tends to be less laggy than VNC.

Hi, I had to ask and I’ll preface it with Linux noob, pi noob… Lag? Now, keep in mind I started with rpi 4b 8GB and a 128GB sd card. Which of course is overkill but that’s me Mr. Overkill. Noting the sd card was slow, etc… I upgraded yesterday to 64 bit with a 240gb ssd and well, so far, the damn thing flies. I’m just settling in tonight to begin installing dev tools etc. to move forward with. The performance is fantastic. Getting another pi for the dev environment as well. I’m jazzed because, well, open source and the prices? I’ve years of windows exp and other things and the cost of building out dev env and such is just ridiculous. Everything in this land is so accessible, and open to examination. Anyway, mine seems to fly.

How do I get to Device Profiles to change back to AV Jack

Many thanks for the work that goes into the updates, and the new web page. The old page (https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/) used to also have a link so that one could download the SHA256 checksum (security hash) in a file (with a name that matched that of the OS file. That was a _very_ useful feature of the page as it saved one having to create a file in which to store the checksum. Can we have it (link & file) back please? It doesn’t need to replace the shiny new box, though arguably it’s more useful to have it as a file.
Thanks.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/software/operating-systems/

My apologies. It’s been a while since I looked at the old page and I thought there were links to download the SHA256 checksum as a file. I’ve just gone back & checked on the Wayback m/c and there weren’t links. I still suggest there’s a good case for providing the file versions in order to check the veracity.
I’ve also just noticed that the source code for this page has gone up an order of magnitude (from 50KB to ~500KB). Surely this is uncessary inflation (for a simple page)? It costs money to move a byte, and that money (eventually) buys more CO2.

Nice update but still cant use my bluetooth headset, when go to Audio Inputs-> NG-A31BT it say “Failed to connect Bluetooth device – Could not set profile for device I/O Error and whe go to Device Profile is Off, I choose Headset Unit (HSP/HFP) click on Accept but nothing happens, when go back to device profile is off again , I will try a freshly install.

I’m facing similar issue. I tried a fresh install as well but still unsuccessful. Did you solve this issue? Thank you.

Nop, same issue, maybe the brand of bluetooth is too bad, ?‍♂️ but only can listen with A2DP Sink, with HSP, the milcrophone get input/Output error. And disconnect the earphones when you try to set Audio Input -》 NG-A31BT (model of headset)

I try thisbut Failed to set card profile to headseat head unit, maybe cos my bluetooth headset is a local brand, Perhaps for yours works ok.
https://github.com/lmandres/RaspbianBluetoothScripts

I did an “Update to an Existing Image” and after rebooting I lost the “RPI Configuration” screen under “Preferences”

Very useful upgrade.
I was tearing my hair out trying to get eduActiv8 to work properly (some of the sound worked but what I suspect is text to speech didn’t) but, following the upgrade, it is all working fine.

Have you got your own fork of chromium or are you contributing to the chromium project?

An excellent upgrade. I very much appreciate the addition of CUPS and the switch to PulseAudio seems to make sense to me as well.

However, the upgrade process via apt roasted my RealVNC configuration and my shadow password file. After the update I needed to reconfigure RealVNC server and reset my user password. The affect on the shadow password file was disconcerting.

As always, thank you !

Hi Simon,
Thanks for the update and I am thrilled to see some practical implementation of accessibility.
Chromium is accessible. You need to add the –force-renderer-accessibility flag to all the chromium shortcuts. I speak from experience. I doubt the adding of the flag will degrade the experience for sighted users.

Thank you very much for the tip about Chromium – I’ll give it a try!

Hi friends, is it possible in a future release to use a more modern file manager by default like Thunar and use a menu like the MATE Menu (erede of the old Mint Menu) to allow search? What dentures me from Raspberry pi OS is are the lackluster Win95 menu and outdated PCManFM file manager

Maybe the best option would be to switch to XFCE (which I would love and totally approve) and specially with the pi 4 (although Xubuntu 16.04 ran flawlessly on a pi 3) but I understand you would not like at all to change DE and in turn leave old pis out of support but I certainly would love ve to get the benefits of modern Linux, another great idea would be to do like Peppermint OS and use a hybrid LXDE XFCE desktop ripping the benefits of both approaches

Sigh…and to think that I updated 13 (!) Pis two days ago…fortunately these changes won’t affect most of them.
Thanks for all the work, folks, actually much appreciated that RPiOS is maintained and updated on an ongoing basis.

Ansible can be your friend! I have it keeping nightly tabs on update/upgrade on 39 boards. Will have to tweak to “full-upgrade” for a one off run.
Kind regards.

Good news.
But one question remains: when will the 64 bit will come out? That would be beyond great!

Specially with a pi 4 with 8 GB of RAM

I’ve been running pulse audio on my pi4 for a few months now as I wanted a systemwide equalizer and pulse audio had the best solution for me. Glad to see it will be native now!

Hi, I was curious if the PulseAudio would solve the problem with PyAudio. In Python3 after initialize PyAudio() I have many ALSA warnings even after full-upgrade (RPi4B4). So did PulseAudio not fully replace ALSA? Or it is a different problem?

PulseAudio is effectively a layer that sits on top of ALSA; it still uses ALSA to communicate with some devices. So ALSA is not removed from your system when you install PulseAudio; indeed PulseAudio wouldn’t work if it was…

Hi Simon, thanks for your job. I’m worried about my python application that uses subprocess to control alsamixer and produce event-related audio effects. (for example: subprocess.run ([“sudo”, “amixer”, “-c”, card, “cset”, numid, volume_percentage]). Could the update bother me? I don’t have the ability to verify, because my system is connected and in case of malfunctions, I would have problems.

In theory, ALSA commands like the one you describe should still work in a PulseAudio environment, but they really shouldn’t be used any more; there are PulseAudio equivalents which should be used instead. So yes, it is certainly possible that the update might cause problems for you – the best thing to do is to use the SD Card Copier to back it up and try it.

Thank you. Currently my device is working so well that I’m terrified of making updates. I bought a new Raspberry Pi, I’ll do some tests hoping really not to have to rewrite the software and installation documentation (which involves the use of an external sound card) :-(

http://people.csail.mit.edu/hubert/pyaudio/ says “PyAudio provides Python bindings for PortAudio, the cross-platform audio I/O library.” and http://www.portaudio.com/ says “and Unix (OSS/ALSA).” so it sounds like PyAudio only talks to the “ALSA layer” rather than the “PulseAudio layer” ?

It looks like they have set up PulseAudio in in much the same way as on other desktops I’ve used, so that the “default” ALSA device forwards to PulseAudio, which in turn may, after processing, forward it back to a specific ALSA device. And it looks like the PulseAudio volume control is applied in software and the hardware volume controls are left alone for ALSA mixers to control, but I would not count on that always being true.

Ah perfect. I’ve been having a blast retargeting my Vulkan based game to run against the new Pi 4 driver. I’d better get busy and finish the game before the driver ships in the OS I guess. :)

Thanks for the update!
I have a question regarding PulseAudio. My bluetooth headset always uses the A2DP profile (no mic), when I connect it. I would like to make the headset use the profile HSP permanently. Is there a config file, where I can change this?

If you select that device as the default input device in the audio selector menu, then it should stay in HSP all the time.

Hi,
My Bluetooth mic is not appearing in the default input. In fact, the default input/option is not appearing despite selecting the headset option. Any lead on how to solve this? Thank you

Hi Simon,
I struggled a lot with the bluetooth profile on RPI 4B. However was never able to connect my handsfree BT devices with RPI. The new JAN 2021 update gave some hope and today I was trying to connect by BT devices as a source for microphone, however those devices were not allowing to select the HSP/HFP profile and was showing input/output error. And those devices were not listed as Audio Input selection in the sound drop down. The I re-read the info which you had given and the reference Boom gave a hint that probably it will work with JBL headset. I had one JBL BT45 in working condition and tried to connect that and voila, it started appearing in Audio Input list and by default it had HSP/HFP profile. However, what I was expecting is if this has something to do with the hardware, it should be mentioned in documentation so that people can buys those specific products.
Do you have a guideline on working BT hardware/type. This may help multiple people who are still struggling to get their handsfree devices connected to RPI 4B.

Thanks
Prakash Kumar

I got kernel panic after upgrade. :-(
“Cannot allocate SWIOTBL buffer …”

do i read it right, that previous audio was driven completely and exclusively by ALSA?
so maybe my issue wihle video playback under firefox-esr will be fixed now, by the PulseAudio layer?
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=968293
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=283501

Previously, all audio other than Bluetooth was handled completely by ALSA. (Bluetooth was handled by the bluez-alsa program which did something clever to pipe audio into and out of ALSA.)

Hi all, I hope I’m at the right place, I have a Pi-400 to use to run a SDRPlay receiver but both downloads for the Pi from SDRPlay don’t work, has anyone got a solution, thank you.

I just updated my Pi 4b, I keep getting error related to clock synchronization. Any advice on how to solve this?
Thank you.

That error means your Raspberry Pi is unable to see an Internet time server – check your network connection.

Hi,
It is connected to the internet and I can browse well. The only issue was that the unsynchronized clock. However, I got it sorted out now using:
sudo apt install htpdate

Audio output (headphone jack) is now in mono only.
How to fix this?

No, it’s not – it’s just that it is incorrectly labelled as being mono in its profile! It’s still in stereo.

Has anyone had trouble with WiFi after the update? I’m having issues with WiFi and USB tethering from phone. Although not 100% sure it’s related to update.

I didn’t see any wifi issues in my testing, but some of the low-level wifi firmware has been tweaked for some platforms in this release, so it isn’t impossible. I’m not aware of anything changing that could affect USB tethering.

Perhaps this is related, but I have been having issues with running the new release on A+ and zero. If I try to run Chromium, after a short time, or if a site requires a “human” confirmation, the browser runs very slow or locks up. I think it might be related to new video elements.

Hi, very enjoyed by these updates!
Just a small problem, since I use Pulse Audio, the sound with HDMi on my monitor is very loud…. very difficult to hear sounds. It work better with Alsa.
Maybe a setting I forgot?

ALSA is still the underlying Sound System. Pulse Audio has replaced BlueAlsa and adds a layer on top of ALSA to configure Audio.

Did you follow the instructions to remove BlueAlsa ?

Yes I follow instructions and that work, I can acces to Devices profiles, HDMi is activates the volume controls is 100% and 100% with VLC or with Netflix with Chromium, but very loud…. sorry for my poor english ;)

That’s right, alsamixer in Terminal, sound card by defaut was Pulse Audio , F6 to edit sound card and select hdmi1, and it work fine!!! Sound is ok now with VLC and Chromium :)

Dual monitors not working any more after upgrade.
They still work fine on the SD card that was not upgraded yet.

When I try to install pulse audio it says abort. Any idea why that would be?

Will the PulseAudio support as is provide sound via a Remote Desktop connection (xRDP)? I was trying to get that going a while back and didn’t have any success.
Thanks

Great update on audio! Voice calls with Telegram Desktop and with Messenger and Teams in Chromium are all working now with UGREEN USB sound card and GSFINBT17 Bluetooth headset too :) For some reason, Powerpoint 365 in Chromium still produces garbled full-screen view.

Does video conferencing with Teams work flawlessly ? I want to buy a Raspi for my daughter, so that she can attend online classes. I had heard that video conferencing was not working with Teams and Chromium. I hope they fixed it !

Q1: If pulseaudio is a layer above alsa can I continue to select the output device of mplayer etc. using, for example, this option
-ao alsa:device=plughw=b1.0 ‘
If not and I have to use pulseaudio with -ao pulse what are the device names.
Q2: will pulseaudio ever create a .asoundrc file ?

Q1 – you can, but PulseAudio will probably fight for control of the ALSA device, so it’s unlikely to be reliable. How an application selects its audio output is down to the individual application, but with pulse you shouldn’t have to select audio on a per application basis any more – just use the taskbar audio switcher to select the default output.

Q2 – no, never.

Since I updated i can not get Chromium to play any videos on YouTube or Netflix. Also will not play Spotify in the browser now.
Before the update I was running everything fine with Chromium Media Edition. Now none of them will run in either.

The Chromium Media Edition will need to be updated for Chromium 84. I’m not sure if that has happened – try re-downloading it from wherever you got it in the first place!

You must use Chromium widevine now.
https://github.com/Botspot/chromium-v84-widevine

Thanks for the link Fred!

With this new OS, is it possible to stream both Audio and Video? Recommended software?

If you wish to stream audio and video, you may be interested in using software that is tailor made for this, like Jellyfin:
https://jellyfin.org/
Here’s a guide for setting up Jellyfin on a Raspberry Pi:
https://www.electromaker.io/tutorial/blog/how-to-install-jellyfin-on-the-raspberry-pi

File Manager still crashes after prolonged use and continues to crash repeatedly until a reboot then the whole cycle begins

I had made the update, i removed the .asoundrc file.
I have a Hifiberry-digi hat, no problem with VLC, I can still choose ALSA and sound is great in passthrough. But there is nothing in Kodi, no sound, so now, i can’t use anymore my media center, it was working perfectly before the update, please HELP !!!

I don’t use Kodi myself, but it is supposed to work with Pulse – there may be some helpful information here – https://kodi.wiki/view/PulseAudio

Thanks for your help, but it does not change anything.
I can’t see anything related to my audio HAT in Kodi, i can’t have passthrough audio. I following the Kodi tutorial several times. Well, it’s probably a problem with Kodi, but well, to make it works, i uninstalled pulseaudio completely

I too would love to have passthrough in Kodi. I thought I read that we’d need to use the KMS kernel but Kodi won’t work due to the fact it uses OMX player. I may be wrong about this so please someone correct me.

after the full-upgrade, i found something strange in firefox-esr.
some few videos now play back without sound.
e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Wrc4fHSCpw
on syslog i can see:
pulseaudio[1217]: E: [pulseaudio] bluez5-util.c: GetManagedObjects() failed: org.freedesktop.DBus.Erro.
…
pulseaudio[1217]: E: [alsa-sink-bcm2835 HDMI 1] alsa-sink.c: ALSA woke us up to write new data to the device, but there was actually nothing to write.
pulseaudio[1217]: E: [alsa-sink-bcm2835 HDMI 1] alsa-sink.c: Most likely this is a bug in the ALSA driver ‘snd_bcm2835’. Please report this issue to the ALSA developers.
pulseaudio[1217]: E: [alsa-sink-bcm2835 HDMI 1] alsa-sink.c: We were woken up with POLLOUT set — however a subsequent snd_pcm_avail() returned 0 or another value < min_avail.

It is possible to follow chrome upgrades (now 87), or the chromium cannot go over 84?

Is there a way to use hardware acceleration ?

When i test with Chromium and a Raspberry Pi 400, i have no hardware acceleration with chrome://gpu

is there no option in chromium:
Settings | Advanced | System | Use hardware acceleration …
on your version?

I have seen that, there is acceleration for the interface (and for many things) but not for video decode.

I’ve just checked this – if I install the CPU usage plugin onto the taskbar and watch a YouTube video in Chromium, CPU load is initially fairly high at around 60%, but then drops to around 20% after a few second. This wouldn’t happen unless hardware video decode was occurring – the low CPU load indicates that the video hardware is taking over the acceleration. This is on a Pi 4.

Thanks for the update!

For my part, after a fresh install, when I link a Youtube video to 1080@60, my CPU never drops below 80%.
Did I miss a parameter to modify?

I was testing YouTube today and was seeing CPU loads of around 15-25% when playing 1080 content. It might be worth reinstalling Chromium and deleting the contents of ~/.config/chromium – this will also delete bookmarks, cookies etc, so be careful!

* when I watch a Youtube video *
In addition I also notice “screen tearing” as well as “frames drops”.

I hope these two items above are normally also fixed :).

We’re aware of the tearing issue – it’s being worked on, but is proving tricky to fix.

Hello Simon,

After several fresh installations (full and normal version of raspberry pi os), several settings (increase in RAM for the GPU, use of the GL driver (FAKE KMS), deactivation of xcompmgr), manual installation of the libgles2-mesa library, tried with several different cables and screens, I always have a CPU with more than 80% of use and a lot of loss of frames (more than 25%) …
Try this video in 1080p60: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MieluM0c6c personal, I notice lots of artifacts and drop frames.
For information, each modification was tested individually after a fresh installation, then I tested different combinations, until testing everything together.

However with my chromebook which uses an old pentium, this same video read in 1080p60 is perfectly read without any loss of frames or aberations while I make copies of files from a usb key and several chrome tabs as well as applications running in stains …

The December version of raspberry pi os defaults to version 84 of Chrome, which does not allow hardware video decoding to be enabled in the flags.
On the other hand, after a fresh install of raspberry pi os and that I carry out an update (sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade), that installs me among other the version 86 of chrome, which allows in the flags enable hardware video decoding.
So I tried different combinations again and the best I managed to get is a CPU that remains at 50% of use, still frames lost, even if there is a little less, so a bit smoother reading …

For me this update of os & chrome / lib / drivers is not up to what is announced, but maybe I missed a configuration or a manipulation?

If you have a tip, I’m a taker !!
Because I am developing a WebApp which must run on RPI and I need to play videos smoothly (the “screen tearing” problem is not too annoying for me, even if the rendering will be better if the video is perfectly read :)).

Last precision, I use a box (Argon40 One for RPI4) with the fan always active, which means that the CPU has never exceeded 45 ° C, the CPU / GPU was not limited during my tests.

Our hardware acceleration does not appear under chrome://gpu – that only shows hardware acceleration for x86/x64 platforms, not ARM platforms.

This is amazing. Bluetooth audio working perfectly. YouTube playing seemlessly. On another note, when will you be selling raspberry pis with an M1 chip? :)

Any upgrade to Python in this release?

Hello,
Thanks for your job. The update solves one of my problems. In fact, whem i play a video on chromium. I haven’t sound in my headphone.
Thanks

I am looking forward to the printer connection feature but I had already installed cups and the new system gives a CUPS server error ‘client-error-bad-request’ when I try to open print settings. I would normally just to a fresh OS install but this is on a Pi4 which is booting from a USB SSD so not easy to replace the OS….

I hope that Google meet screen sharing works on Chromium now…

Just updated my MythTV frontend box and everything seams to be working good with Myth.
But having an issue with using a Bluetooth headset. I did the Bluetooth updates suggested. I paired my Bose headphones, but when I try to connect to them I get the following message: ‘Connection failed – Use the audio menu to connect to this device’.
Anyone know how to do this? I can’t find the audio menu…
Thanks

The audio menu is the one you get when you right-click the speaker symbol on the taskbar – just select your Bose headphones as the output device in there.

Thanks Simon, but my Bose were not present in the Audio menu you mention. I did figure out the issue. The fix, for me, was to remove my headphones from the bluetooth menu, then add them again. The catch is when you add a bluetooth device, do not click pair until the question mark icon to the left of the device name changes to reflect what kind of device it is. With the Bose headphones, when I waited a bit the icon changed from a question mark to a speaker, then I clicked pair. After that then the headphones showed up in the audio menu. It appears if you pair before the Pi can figure out what kind of device it is, then it doesn’t know to add the device to the audio menu.

Yes, that would make sense – some devices appear as non-audio devices when they are first detected. No idea why – there are so many different Bluetooth implementations which all seem to behave slightly differently from each other! I do always wait for an audio icon before pairing – I should probably prevent pairing with unknown devices in that list in future. Glad you got it working.

That trick of disconnecting the bluetooth device and reconnecting worked. Many thanks

Does hardware acceleration work on RPi 3?

After the change from ALSA to PulseAudio, the 3.5mm jack only outputted mono with no option to change to stereo. I found the solution on https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=257785
Basically go to /usr/share/pulseaudio/alsa-mixer/profile-sets/default.conf and comment out (#) the mono parts.

Whoops – you’re quite right! I’d assumed Pulse was just incorrectly labelling the output as mono, but it is indeed being treated as mono. What you have done does work as a workaround, but I think the problem is that our internal driver is incorrectly reporting its capability to Pulse – I’ll try and fix that and upload it to apt.

Also, before the correction HDMI wasn’t outputting stereo too, now it does! I tested on a Pi 3 v1.2

I’ve confirmed this behaviour on both HDMI and AV Jack outputs – Pulseaudio outputs mono to both with the new release – it seems to be mixing the left and right channels of the source together, before outputting to both the left and right output channels. The previous release, without PulseAudio, correctly output stereo.

Yes, I’ve been working on it today and have a fix – a bit more testing, and we’ll get it into apt in the next few days.

Hi,
I have tested myself and I confirm that in the case of PulseAudio not only is in mono but if my hears don’t tricky me, I think is only one audio channel, not the mix of right and left.
I also confirmed in Kodi that if I choose the PulseAudio instead of the PI:HDMI and Analogue the sound is mono.
Regards,
Luis Sismeiro

I only get sound on the right channel after this update. This is after the workaround to comment out the mono settings in config mentioned above.

All that changed was that I now see ‘Stereo Output’ instead of ‘Mono Output’ in the sound Device Profiles. I also had to set the ‘AV Jack’ device to ‘Off’ to ensure HDMI remained as the default.

Do we have to wait for a driver fix or has anyone managed to get stereo output working on the Raspberry Pi 4 after this update?

Thanks all in advance!

Hello Luis,
Do you think this os why my hifiberry digi Hat does not work within Kodi ?
I mean, whatever options i choose in audio options in Kodi, I can’t choose my hifiberry hat as passthrough output device, it’s always greyed out with PI:HDMI pre-selectioned

Hi,
I would really like to help you but I don’t know myself.
Regards,
Luis Sismeiro

Thank you. For Pi 4 all outputs including HDMI were outputting Mono. After this workaround I’m getting Stereo.

Nice. Installed raspberrypios from pinn today to run KODI for a media center to give my dad for Christmas and didn’t realize I was using a new update. Anyways, since PulseAudio has support for multiple output devices (at least that is what I understand from the post), is there a way I can have audio from KODI go to both bluetooth and the audio out on the pi? Or would I need to have a button to switch between the two?

does PulseAudio support 5.1 audio in hdmi port . I try to make media center but cant output video 5.1 audio

Thanks for this update, Now YouTube is working very smoothly

Ever thought about adding a dark mode in Raspberry Pi Configuration or something. I like adwaita-dark but wish there was an easy to use dark mode that was like PiX dark or something. Also, something like night light (warm screen colors) would be awesome! I am writing this on my Pi 4 4GB that I use as my desktop PC. Thank you for your products!

Everything worked fine for me after updating my existing install (just got a new pi 4 last Sun.) except for the volume media keys. To fix that you need to change the volume media keys section of your ~/.config/openbox/lxde-pi-rc.xml file from the old volumealsabt etc. like so:

lxpanelctl command amixer -D pulse sset Master 5%+

lxpanelctl command amixer -D pulse sset Master 5%-

lxpanelctl command amixer -D pulse sset Master toggle

Of course you can change 5% to whatever value you prefer. ;-]

Sorry, please remove the “lxpanelctl command” from each of those three lines to make it work. Of course you must also logout the login for the changes to take effect.

Using amixer in a Pulse environment isn’t a good idea as it is an ALSA tool, so this will not set volume for Bluetooth devices. There’s a better way of setting the volume for Pulse in the new master Openbox config file, but it won’t have copied across to your local Openbox settings if you have customised it. Resetting to defaults in the Appearance Settings would make the change for most people.

Thanks for letting me know. I’m not currently using bluetooth so I hadn’t noticed. I’d prefer to preserve my other settings, so would you please point me to the proper commands to use instead of resetting to defaults?

Ran a copy on a 3B+ and had good success running Zoom on Chromium. Need to now run a migration instead of a scratch load.

Ah, found the proper pulseaudio commands:

pactl — set-sink-volume 0 +5%

pactl — set-sink-volume 0 -5%

Yup, those are the ones!

Thanks for the confirmation. I ended up going back to the alsa commands for now.

For the curious: The reason is I just installed the awesome shairplay-sync (apple airplay to the pi) and want to use D-bus commands for play/pause/etc. Unfortunately D-bus only works with services, and pulseaudio (as currently configured by the OS) is not compatible with running shairplay-sync as a service with pa backend. Running as a service (with alsa backend) works great except that then the pi’s volume control doesn’t affect the airplay audio.

While updating an existing setup:
update-inetd: warning: cannot add service, /etc/inetd.conf does not exist

I needed a 5th step to complete the installation. After the: sudo apt install pulseaudio-module-bluetooth
I had to run “sudo apt autoremove” then reboot.

After installing this update my task bar is missing the button with all my applications. How can we get that back?

Sounds like your configuration got scrambled somehow – try opening Appearance Settings and using one of the buttons on the Defaults tab to reset to defaults.

That did not work for me.

Somehow I lost my wastebasket by a similar thing and the appearance menu got locked up. Rebooting and changing the second time did it for me.

“We do not install pulseaudio by default, because, well, it’s just a bit rubbish”. This was written in the Raspberry Pi Troubleshooting Forum by jamesh (Principal Software Engineer at Raspberry Pi (Trading) Ltd.) in response to a sound issue in Raspberry Pi OS. I wonder if jamesh is ready to eat his words for calling PulseAudio “rubbish”? See:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=257785&p=1571923&hilit=rubbish+pulseaudio#p1571923

To be fair, the blog post mentions: “… competing and conflicting software, none of which quite works the way anyone wants it to!”

That includes PulseAudio, which has quirks and bugs here and there. But until recently not many people needed their Pis to playback multiple audio sources – mainly due to insufficient performance. So it wasn’t worth the effort to replace ALSA and add new problems. Google this: “Why do people dislike PulseAudio?” and you’ll find a Reddit thread with plenty to read. It’s a bit old, but their bug tracker still has hundreds of open issues, so it’s easy to see that although it’s a very capable project, it still needs plenty of polish.

Now with the Pi 4’s performance increase, it makes perfect sense to bite the bullet and migrate to PulseAudio because a lot more people will need its capabilities. Although it still needs work, as seen even in the comments here, it has to happen.

Thank`s a lot. i had to install “ofono” to “pulseaudio” working correctly

I’m having a bit of an odd one. I set my terminal colors in .bash_profile by exporting LS_COLORS with my color string. I can echo the variable there to see it’s in fact getting set. But by time I get to the terminal prompt, the colors aren’t set, and if I use ‘env’, I see that they’re set to the default. If I manually ‘source .bash_profile’, I see my colors just fine!

Seems something after .bash_profile is clobbering LS_COLORS now, and I can’t seem to figure out what changed?

Other than that, it seems upgrading went smoothly, thanks for all the hard work!

That’s odd – I’m not aware of having changed anything to do with bash settings in this release.

Nope, you’re right. I was able to go back to an older image and reproduce it there too. No idea why I can’t seem to set LS_COLORS in .bash_profile. Everything else ends up in env correctly, just that one seems to get lost. Really odd!

It would be great if, like you have done with the printer, make a GUI for built in network connection to a home network. For many trying to set this up on their own with installing the software and then changing the config file to enable it to work and to add the network name – all through an editor that they are not used to using at all, this becomes a chore and something to be avoided – even with trying to follow a tutorial. I have been waiting for this addition for a long time with the recommended Raspberry Pi OS. It would open it up to many more – just as you have done with the printer function. Thanks!

You mentioning a network name makes me assume you are talking about connecting to a wireless network – is that the case? You can already do this easily just by clicking on the network icon on the taskbar, choosing your SSID from the list and entering your password when prompted. To connect to a wired network, you shouldn’t need to do any more than just plug in an Ethernet cable to your router – assuming your router is running DHCP (and they pretty much all do), the network setup should be completely automatic.

If you have more specialised requirements, such as manually setting an IP address, right-click the network icon and choose “Wired / Wireless Network Settings”, which will allow you to manually configure any network interface.

Trouble with Network Settings from the menu bar is – it does not pull the current setting, but leaves everything blank and it is not always updated when you change net. Mine for example shows a WiFi active which I used a week ago.

Hi,
Nice to see the tradition of new release of the Raspberry Pi OS in December continues. Thank you for your work.
In another topic, I had both WiFi and BT soft blocked with rfkill on my RPi4 but after the upgrade it doesn’t work so I can unblock the radios, the command doesnit output anything when I do a “rfkill list” or try to unblock.
Regards,
Luis Sismeiro

Hello,
please when I am using lite version of OS – is it possible to select the GPIO pin to which it is connected and set the temperature at which it turns on and off – is it possible to set this via classic command prompt / via editing which text file, please ? Regards, Roman

Are you referring to configuring for an attached fan? If so:
sudo raspi-config
Or edit /boot/config.txt:
dtoverlay=gpio-fan,gpiopin=14,temp=80000
See comment https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/new-raspberry-pi-4-case-fan/#comment-1545909

That’s great, is it possible to to remove the raspberry pi is and install other OS’s like Ubuntu. Because my project need Ubuntu. It will work on Ubuntu only.

I noticed a strange problem when playing youtube videos in chromium: when I move my logitech wireless mouse, the whole display turns black and after 2 second (quickly) fades in again. As long as I move the mouse, this keeps occurring. If the video playback is paused this does not happen.

Hi there. I have the same issue with pulseaudio as with other OS like Ubuntu Mate. I use 2 Montitors with HDMI to DVI an the sound should work on the 3.5 jack. But with pulseaudio it does NOT work with 2 monitors connected. Even it shows me all outputs HDMI-1, HDMI-2 and AV Jack, but no sound on AV Jack. It seems it’s been tested only with one monitor connected which works fine for me too. But I want it get working with 2 monitors connected. I only found a workaround at the forum for 64bit RaspberryOS : https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=275372&start=125
May be someone can take a look on this issue?
Thanks
Karsten

Karsten,
I experienced exactly the same effect with this setup (2 monitors connected with MicroHDMI/DVI adpator). No sound anymore on the 3.5mm jack. Went back to a November backup as I am an absolute Raspberry newbie. Then today I found that apparently it is because of that change to PulseAudio and now I do not dare to upgrade my system anymore. Is this blog the source to watch out for this issue to be resolved (again, I’m an absolute beginner, just strieving to use the Pi 4 as an alternative to a full-size PC, have only basic Linux knowledge)?

I also have this problem of no sound from AV Jack and two screens connected via HDMI. I have experimented with turning off both HDMI and switch off and on AV Jack, but nothing helps.

Sound from AV Jack started to work after another reboot.

Same problem here, AV jack does not work with 2 HDMI monitors on Pi4, but does work with one HDMI monitor
With two monitors both the commands below fail, but work if the HDMI device is selected,
omxplayer -o local myfile.mp4
mplayer -ao alsa:device=plughw=Headphones.0 file.mp3
maybe this indicates a lower level problem than pulseaudio

I got a question when updating:
Configuration file ‘/etc/xdg/autostart/piwiz.desktop’
==> Deleted (by you or by a script) since installation.
==> Package distributor has shipped an updated version.
What would you like to do about it ? Your options are:
Y or I : install the package maintainer’s version
N or O : keep your currently-installed version
D : show the differences between the versions
Z : start a shell to examine the situation
The default action is to keep your current version.
*** piwiz.desktop (Y/I/N/O/D/Z) [default=N] ?

I wonder what I should answer.

As mentioned in the upgrade instructions in the blog post, just accept the default to any question asked, which includes this one! So N, or just enter.

Would there be any issue if I chose “yes” to piwiz.desktop bit? I am wondering if some of my choices messed up my ability to get Bluetooth audio…

All the answer to that question does is to determine if you see the startup wizard again on the next boot – it wouldn’t have made any difference to Bluetooth audio.

Now Chromium tab counsumes 100% cpu while playing music. It used to be 6-7%.

Apparently if you launch Chromium and other Electron apps with –force-renderer-accessibility, they work with Orca. I have not yet tested this. I definitely appreciate all the accessibility work that has gone into this update.

Many thanks for the update, nice work!
Only threee little glitches so far:
1. ALSA driver solved by the nice hints here,
2. HDMI stereo, solved as well,
3. display glitch – missing lines in the top menu bar, got it back by re-initialising the defaults section in the config

Looking at Preferences>Audio Device Settings I still see BCM2835 HDMi (Alsa Mixer) and
BCM2835 Headphones (Alsa Mixer
Shouldn’t those be gone too?

Ah – yes, I should have added an instruction to remove Audio Device Settings – it’s not needed under Pulse. I’ll update the blog post. Sorry about that!

Bluetooth sound now works for all web sites I tried, youtube, radio stations.
Great job!

I decided to do a fresh install on my Pi 4, as my previous installation was rather messed up anyway. So far, so good – this new release seems excellent, and makes for a really usable desktop. Although my 2GB Pi will go back into service in ‘server mode’ with Pi-Hole for now, and also my WireGuard VPN endpoint, which runs very nicely (install the packages via Debian Testing, after adding the kernel headers).

It would be truly amazing if you guys could get in touch with the people at Dropbox and nudge them or help them to produce a client/daemon for the Pi (preferably both 32bit and 64bit). It doesn’t seem to be on their do-it list despite many requests and it would greatly help cross-platform working. Thanks!

My vote for that, too.

works great, but I was caught out by docker. After the upgrade and reboot I had lost all network connectivity. This was fixed by stopping all containers, rebooting and starting them again.

after full-upgrade all audio files (mp3, m4a, …) playing back with VLC player have 2 to 3 interruptions in the first few seconds of playback each audio file in the playlist.
and the audio files don’t playback in stereo anymore.
i use the primary HDMI port for audio/video output.
in the list of device profiles only analog mono output is listed.

ok, the mono issue i could fix with the workaround form “Nuno Vincent”.
go to /usr/share/pulseaudio/alsa-mixer/profile-sets/default.conf and comment out (#) the mono parts.

but the two or three short interruptions in the beginning of each audio file in VLC player play list is still an annoying issue.

I’ve been working on the mono issue today and have a fix – we’ll have it in apt in the next few days, hopefully.

here details to the issue with the interruption on VLC player at playback audio files.
see https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=293569&p=1773735#p1773735

i attached test tone files that shows up the issue clearly. it happens only for files that were recorded not at high level.

yes, sins the upgrade from 2020-12-07 the audio device profile is now “Digital Stereo Output”.
(the device switched to “AV Jack” automatically, but it is easy to switch back to “HDMI”)
thank you.

I used this guide to make my Pi4 desktop also serve as a bluetooth receiver…
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=247892
It uses bluealsa. If I follow the upgrade instruction, I lose bluealsa. To do the same thing with pulse audio seems problematic in the unofficial guides I found. Can the raspberry pi team post a guide on how to do this reliably with pulseaudio?

Ok, so… this just works out of the box. I saw some posts on an ubuntu forum that pulse just does this now. I can pair a phone with the pi, play music on the phone and it plays through the pi. No setup. It seems to make a loopback device from the phone to the default output.

Only problem… adjusting volume on the phone does not change input volume on the pi. That worked with the bluealsa method. Searching for an answer to this one. Anybody already know how?

To control the volume, see step 7 in this guide…
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=235519

But there are still 2 dealbreaker issues for me…
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=235519&start=25#p1774043

I still cannot get HTML5 video from YouTube free movies to play. I get a dark screen with the message “Your browser does not currently recognize any of the video formats available.” To see this, search for “War Games” and try to play it. The url is https://youtu.be/HNLQ-O-Qx3Y

That video gives an error that says “Video unavailable
The uploader has not made this video available in your country.” here in the UK, on both Pi 4 with this new release of RasPiOS, and on my Windows 10 Pro-based laptop.

Thank you team. I updated the RaspberryPi OS to this release and it works fine. Using my RaspberryPi4B w/ Node-Red 1.26 and Atlas-Scientific Sensors over i2c. It just works!

Had just updated my pi4/4GB and now the menu bar on lx-desktop flickers a few times after session start and disappears.
Desktop on other users are unchanged (no printer support aso.).
What has gone wrong?

I have the same issue. The taskbar disappear after some flickering, no possibility to recover it without reboot.
So much problems with the update !!

Here some additions to my problem:
Tried several times:
– Boot system before update (i’ve a clone) – task bar ok for root/pi/other users
– Clone system on SSD
– Boot cloned system – all ok
– Update (apt update / apt full-upgrade
– Reboot updated system
– Task bar for pi / other user –> ok
– Task bar for root –> flickering several times and disappears

someone decided root should not log into a remote desktop. As long as your name is not root, for example super which could be mapped to user number 0 group number 0 everything works fine. so create a user super ,edit passwd entry super
super:x:0:0:super,,,:/home/super:/bin/bash
and replace /home/super by
ln -s /home/super /root ( a sym link )
Now log in as super and you get what you like, till some one will fix what has reasently been broken.

Is there a fix yet for the /dev/video driver? In order to use a raspberry pi camera as a webcam, I had to downgrade to Stretch as I couldn’t get it working at all on any version of Buster!

First of all, I’m impressed that Pulseaudio, and Zoom work! I say that Zoom working at all is a small miracle. On a Pi 4, I was able to achieve ~4-5 frames per second in Zoom (inside Chromium), with reasonable audio. I used a Microsoft LifeCam VX-5000 USB, whose native resolution is 640×480, 30fps (which can be seen performing smoothly this way offline if you install guvcview). For my audio recording and playback, I used a Logitech USB Headset H540, which delivers very good recording and playback quality. Both of these are very Linux-compatible, and were straight plug and play.
pavucontrol was my friend to fine-tune the microphone input level (note: the volume applet in the upper right of the LXDE desktop has a slider for output audio level, **but not input**).
I’ve been hoping some sort of audio or (gasp) video conferencing would work on a Pi ever since the Pi 1! See the forums, and you’ll see my past attempts. :)
Thanks for persisting with this, whomever at Pi Towers got Zoom working in Chromium!! Excelsior!

guvcview has a video recording function, which saves to an .mkv file. When this .mkv file is played back in VLC, VLC claims the video is at encoded at 30fps, however the video playback looks more like 10-15 fps. So if you don’t mind sending **non-live** video messages to others (say, send as attachments to emails, or some other chat forum which allows attachments), then you can get a much-smoother (than ~4fps) .mkv file experience with guvcview.

In guvcview, I dropped the webcam’s resolution from the native 640×480, down to 320×240, same 30fps (I also set the audio recording controls to mono channel, not stereo).
Then when playing the resulting .mkv file back in VLC (this is on a Pi 4, overclocked to 2.0GHz), the playback was **buttery smooth** (and truly looked 30fps).
Furthermore, 320×240 might sound like weak sauce, but surprisingly, it is actually plenty large enough to very clearly make out a person’s every facial aspect, and microexpression.

When guvcview records an .mkv video at 320×240, 30fps, mono audio, over 2 minutes of very decent-looking video will fit in 10MB! That’s quite a long video message, for attaching to an email. I’m impressed.

Хорошее обновление, но вам следует предусмотреть возможность отката обратно на alsa

The PulseAudio update has caused my AdaFruit Speaker Bonnet to stop working. I ran the update over the top of an existing, working system, and also tried installing from the new update and installing the Speaker Bonnet config after. Neither work. The config changes for the Speaker Bonnet are documented here: https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-speaker-bonnet-for-raspberry-pi/raspberry-pi-usage
Would appreciate some guidance in how to rectify this. Would post on the AdaFruit forums but I can’t access them :-(
Thanks, Mark

Mark – I had the same problem with the spkr bonnet. I managed to get it to work with the new Pulseaudio by manually removing all the config from the adafruit guide under “Detailed Install” and then just having “dtparam=audio=on” and “dtoverlay=hifiberry-dac” settings in /boot/config.txt. The existing setup for reducing the popping sound no longer works. Manually disable the systemd using “sudo systemctl disable aplay”, then add the following to /etc/rc.local: su pi -c ‘nohup /usr/bin/aplay -D default -t raw -r 44100 -c 2 -f S16_LE /dev/zero &’ Make sure you reboot after this. Not sure why this works but not using systemd. Still testing!

Thanks Dave. Will give it a go later today.

Confirmed this works as documented above. Thanks again Dave.

Thanks so much for the update. I noticed the update to Chromium and wanted to try webusb. After enabling webusb via chrome://flags/#enable-experimental-web-platform-features it seemed to work fine. A friend developed a webapp https://slappy.io/ for programming CircuitPython boards and it depends on this. His main goal was supporting Chromebooks in schools, but it’s great to be able to use it on the Pi as well. (Obviously the Pi has other options like Mu.)
I’m sure that there are others using webusb for other purposes who may be interested.

I accepted the package maintainer settings while updating and the Setup Wizard told me my password was “raspberry” and that I had to change it. Clearly that was wrong, so does the code simply show that step without checking?

Isn’t the password easy to check based on its encrypted value? That password change step should be skipped if the password has been changed.

I accepted the package maintener too.
As you, my password was reinitialized, but also my /boot/config.txt
This update is really a piggy one. I use a raspberry pi for so many years, i have never seen such problems with audio, or with any hats after updating the OS

Installing fresh new RaspiOS on RPI4 brings pulseausio working perfect and switching between different audio inputs and outputs without problems, including bluetooth devices. But Sonic Pi (including last version 3.2.2) does not work anymore since uses jackD service from ALSA (via supercollider) and not pulseaudio server. Is there any form to use Sonic Pi with pulseaudio (not ALSA) on Raspbian or another Linux distro? Thank you.

Re sonic-pi 3.2.2
Rhe new Raspbeyrr Pi OS dispenses with the .asoundrc file which was used to select the output required with Sonic Pi 3.2.2 It does actually work but is fixed to use HDMI audio output (which is what the suppplied version 3.1 is using) . You can get it working for now if you enable QjackCtl on the main menu Sound & Video section and then set this up to select the sound card you want to use, and start jackd running there before launching Sonic Pi. You will be unable to use this sound card for other apps via pulseaudio while Sonic Pi is running, and until you quit and stop jackd running. Other solutions are being investigated at the moment including seeing if SuperCollider can be patched to utilise pulseaudio, but they are not ready yet. Keep an eye on in-thread.sonic-pi.net for further information.

When i try to connect my bluetooth earphone which has a microphone using HSP Profile if reconnects to my bluetooth earphones but it fails to change the audio profile to HSP Profile it connects to A2DP only please help.

Where I van download The latest version of raspberry pi OS?

Thank you for the update. Some initial observation here:
1. I patched the update on an existing installation and it worked fine, until I tried to re-enable composite video. Then I could no longer boot up the pi;
2. During the fresh installation after the above-said mishap, I was asked to change password from the default “raspberry”, and change was successful. But when I installed software the installer told me the new password was incorrect, and I had to enter “raspberry” to continue;
3. Screen tearing is still evidenced when viewing YouTube video at 720p or above.

where to report issues relates to the Raspberry Pi OS update?
always here in this thread ?
or on the forum (under which category)?
or at github (under which repository )?
RPi-Distro/repo
raspberrypi/userland
raspberrypi/linux
???

i am guess that not all issues will be fixed or that some of them get overlooked here in this post, before the post gets so old, that nobody takes a look to it.

After 150+ comments and various posts in the Forum, it would appear confusion over Audio is rife.

The Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) provides audio and MIDI functionality to the Linux operating system, that has not changed one iota.

https://www.alsa-project.org/wiki/Main_Page

What has changed is that the developers use PulseAudio as a “user front end” to control the various functions of Audio (web browser, music players, bluetooth audio, USB Audio, Analog etal)

https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/About/

Sorry bro, but you are wrong…
I had to uninstall Pulseaudio to make Kodi works, and have the possibility to choose the audio passthrough output device (hifiberry hat)

After full-upgrade and reboot the audio icon is no longer showing in the taskbar.
Nor is the audio menu available from the Panel Preferences dialog box.
Is an extra step needed to reinstate the audio menu?

Did you follow the Blog and remove BlueAlsa ?

Yes, using purge at the command line, rebooted, then verified in package manager.

I made the mistake of assuming the list of apps when opening the Panel Preferences box was all that’s available. I have since used the the Add button to reveal more options. The new audio icon is now in place. :-)

Good to see the updates and the explanations of what has been getting done.

That´s why there is no audio jack on a 400

Has there been any upgrade to Python? Thanks

I’ve just updated my Raspberry Pi 4 and use audio through the A/V jack. I now cannot get any audio through the jack. Is there an extra step to do if I’m using the jack for audio? Thanks

I can play audio through bluetooth but not through HDMI or A/V jack

After I added pulse audio and cpu freq to to taskbar, now the raspberry start menu icon has gone, whatever I do with panel adjustments I cannot get it back, the menu appears when I move mouse just to left of edge of taskbar

HI I have the new DEC 2020 release working in all respects … except my HDMI audio no longer works,
The audio jack works 100%. When I switch to HDMI audio silence. My HDMI goes through an audio extractor, hence i have set hdmi_drive=2. Apart from the ne release nothing else has changed. Also my bluetooth Vanco headphones, which now connect and play perfect audio for a few seconds before cutting in and out. I use a bluetooth Keyboard, could this be an issue?

Not working for me with the following setup: Downloaded and installed a fresh image as of today, updated with apt. Was able to pair with a cheap (Bass Jaxx) BT speaker (confirmed that it works with both iOS and Android devices) but then when trying to connect Audio, I get a “Failed to connect to Bluetooth device – Could not set profile for device: Input/Output error”. The speaker has a ring to indicate it is communicating/pairing with a device, and it makes these sounds before the connection error appears.

Some Bluetooth devices seem to fail to pair correctly on the first attempt – they usually work the second time. Try connecting again, or delete the pairing and re-pair it.

Thanks for the suggestion: on remove and re-add, the error has changed to: GDBus.Error:org.bluez.Error.Failed: Resource temporarily unavailable. But, in the time it took to write this “yeah but” comment, I noticed that the speaker was connected and it is now working. Thanks.

All good stuff! Upgrade across all my devices has gone OK, but I have a puzzle on 2 x Pi3b …. for some reason the Pulse Audio volume control is missing. Fine on 2 other 3bs, a 4b and a couple of Zero W’s.

Tried changing desktop preferences to default, tried reboot, , made sure I purged Bluealsa- it’s gone, tried updating again (just says everything is up to date).

And now?

Switchung to “AV Jack” breaks video-Playback on my 32-bit-system.
If I switch to AV-Jack I can’t start playing new videos in Chromium (with or without rebooting).
Switching back to HDMI 1 fixes video playback.
I’ve tried “rm ~/.asoundrc” and purging pimixer – no luck.
Is this a known Problem ?

We have found a problem over the weekend whereby using the AV jack as the audio output on a dual-monitor system causes an audio lockup – your reference to HDMI-1 makes me assume you are using two monitors, yes?

We’re investigating this at the moment.

That’s correct. I’m using dual monitors, a ssd-drive (SSD-boot, no SD-card) and a USB-hub for connecting keyboard und mouse to the Pi.
All devices are connected using USB3-ports.
Thanks for the Reply!

I was hoping for a better Youtube experience with the upgrade. However, even though there is a slight improvement, there is still signficant amount of loss frame in youtube. I hope that this issue will be resolved soon. It would be brilliant if netflix and disney+ would work on the Raspberry PI.

It is not “feasible” to support WidevineDRM natively, plenty of 3rd party community workarounds.

Now the sound on Bluetooth has more latency. It is very bad to watch movies where someone says something. Lips are out of sync.

apt may also recommend this command before rebooting >
sudo apt autoremove

I’ve always wanted to upgrade to the latest stable kernels but am stuck with 4.19… as the 5.4 and 5.8 kernels breaks the use of my KVM switch (no response from keyboard and mouse)… already reported several times at forum, but seems am still stuck at this time…
really want to use the new functionality on my desktop systems…

playing around since last post, Pi 4 and Pi 400 affected by the same no HDMI sound issue, normal hdmi_drive=2 setting works fine on both until the upgrade is applied (with all of the Blog updates applied), all cables kept the same during before/during and after upgrade. Normally use 2nd HDMI port checked both, no sound on either.
Any pointers greatfully received, I am out of ideas.

Sorry to say, exact same issue. I also tried reinstalling the older OS (2020-08-20) version and HDMI also not playing sound. Frustrated, being a noob, to,say the least

Update smooth sailing & much appreciated. Using PI for Amateur Radio data modes and control of the transceiver. No problems observed. Thanks!

I also had audio through my bluetooth headsets but no HDMI audio after following the upgrade steps. I wish I hadn’t upgraded at all as everything I use was working fine prior to the upgrade. I have tried to reverse the changes and now have HDMI audio but no bluetooth audio. I also haven’t been able to get the alsa mixer applet back. I hope someone who knows how will post the steps required to undo the audio portions of this “upgrade”.

Same issue- lost HDMI sound. But haven’t found way to fix, not even when reinstalling older OS 2020-08-20.

I had such high hopes for the new Chromium build. I tried running Zoom on my Pi 4 to see how it worked. Of course, it worked great. Then I tried the same process on a 3B+ and was successful. This meant that I would be able to do the update for my mom’s Raspberry (3B+) so she can join her grand kids on Zoom.
The problem showed up when I decided to take the next step and try on a 3A+. All I can say is OUCH! The new OS behaved a little laggy, and, because I was running headless, I was giving it a little benefit of the environment, but it was still noticeably slower that the 3B+, and when I tried running Zoom, it locked up hard, after entering the meeting password. I still think the proper solution, is to get the Zoom folks to break down and make a client build for the RPi ARM group, instead of depending on the Chrome client.

Same problem as above: after upgrade the taskbar crash every login after a couple of blink. Delete the configuration doesn’t help. The only way to restore is to launch from terminal “lxpanel &”.

With new OS, my bluetooth speakers now work. Stuff seems to be working. Thanks for the tons of work.

Scratch 1.4 (scratch and scratch.old) no longer produces sound because it uses ALSA. Sure, there are Scratch 2.0 and 3.0, but on slow, low-memory models, 1.4 is still important. Also, 1.4 has better GPIO support than the other versions. To solve this, vm-sound-pulse.so is needed for the Squeak VM, but it is not available.

This is a know issue and is being worked on at the moment – hopefully we’ll have a fix soon.

Given the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s enormous heft, could you please have a word with Google and ask if they’ll allow porting of Wildvine DRM to armhf please?
Pretty much the first thing that any child does at Cotswold Jam, when it’s explained they can browse the web on a $35 computer, is ask whether they can watch Netflix. Parents react “oh, so it can’t browse the web like a proper computer”. Getting proper Chrome (or even proper Firefox) on to the Pi would be an enormous benefit in pushing the Pi as a desktop replacement. Yes, I know there’s workarounds, but they keep breaking every time Google changes something. I’m sure the Foundation has sufficient heft to persuade Google to help.

I think you’re probably overestimating the relative “heft” of Raspberry Pi vs Google, unfortunately… At the end of the day, we’re a relatively small computer company, and they are one of the biggest tech giants in the world – I suspect they could pay our entire operating costs out of petty cash and not notice! We are trying to find a long-term Widevine solution.

Will it be possible to manually install flash in the future? I still enjoy playing old school flash games once in a while.

Unfortunately not, and even if you could, it wouldn’t work – I believe Adobe have modified recent versions of the player to just fail to load into a browser after the cut-off date this year. Flash will be well and truly dead at that point, so I suspect no-one will even be hosting Flash games for much longer.

There’s a bit of audio lag when playing media or games (the “Doom” source ports, for example) with PulseAudio

Hi Simon, I’ve a pi with dual screen. After the full-upgrade playing sites with videos on chromium or firefox do not work anymore. Disconnect 1 monitor and playing videos works perfect.

Yes, we’ve found an audio issue with using the analog output jack at the same time as dual monitors. If you switch the audio to either HDMI-1 or HDMI-2, it should work. We’re investigating the cause of this lock-up at the moment.

Hi Folks, today I saw that all my printer in CUPS are now showing twice: one time the original with correct description and a second one with no description, but a longer name ending ‘- IPP Everywhere’. Is this a bug or did I miss something? Btw, it is Brother and HP ColorLaserJet types.

Just purge CUPS and install new, that worked for me.

Chromium freezing on new release. I upgraded at the weekend and since then Chromium has repeatedly frozen on me. I dont use it for surfing, it is merely displaying three tabs of interest – my MotionEye CCTV cameras, and some ThingSpeak channels. Anyone one else noticed. I have rebotted several times. Cheers.

The update broke CUPS and the only way was to deinstall completely and do it again. By surprise now CUPS also shows on the menu bar.

I have just followed the instructions to update my PI4, not a fresh install.
When I try and play a youtube video I now get “if playback does not start shortly try restarting your device”
I have done this and it did not fix the issue.
Any ideas what to try?
Everything else seems ok

Steve

Create a new user and Test YouTube With the new account. If It works, Try to clean the Home-folder of pi.

I logged out of youtube rather than create a new account and it did not make a difference

And another one: I coupled a Bose Soundlink Mini to my RPi and was not able to unselect it thereafter – even when the box was no longer present – had to reboot and it disappeared.

One thing I would like to do here – to you Simon and all the others making RPi to happen:

I am a computer nerd since the 70ies, an Apple User since 1985, a Windows user since Version pre-2 and a Raspberry User since the very first beginnings, and I finally have to admit – never had so much fun as with the two latest revisions of Raspberry Pi OS – you are doing a great job!

updated rpi3B+ – notice networking operations changing, sudo ifconfig eth0 down ; sudo ifconfig eth0 up. broken- best thing about *NIX OS is its robustness – now is operating like that other no-name OS requires reboot before network operates. even ifdown eth0 ifup eth0 same response. adding either static and or /etc/network/interfaces entries to eth0 or wlan0 operating same. requires a reboot before networking operates – all worked fine before dec02 update. Even try sudo /etc/init.d/dhcpcd restart or “try-restart” no response till reboot. ufw/gufw response to profile chg slower than norm. does not like Konsole terminal at all. -not sure tmux will work. ? zenity works okay on 3B+ and rpi4 tok. thats nice. any work arounds. ? per networking – be nice to learn. still hacking at a solution. set home gufw profile to block out block in export to block all profile: – now have a safer method to turn off internet when not using. as quick per turn down eth0 or pulling net-cable. getting concerned. (yes just test Tmux works) maybe replace to like using Konsole other nice terminal, for scripting. Cheers. — Cana wait for 64b clear release be nice, patient till its good.

I’m a total ‘newbie’ to PI, have a 3B, and it just will NOT connect to eth0, no matter what I’ve tried from several discussions…worked fine on the same router, same cable, on the previous (-3 versions) version. It does connect to WiFi, so not totally dead, but slow, and it sucks bandwidth from other devices in the house…anybody have any ideas??

Sorry, did not state at the start, this is after the new December update to OS…

So i updated today and followed all steps…. Everything is working fine – except the sound playing .mp4 files via bluetooth inside Kodi: there is a constant horrible crackle, getting worse the more movement is displayed. Playing .mp3 files is fine. When i play the same file in Raspbian/VLC the sound is fine. So it seems to be a specific Kodi problem?

Tested Kodi/Radio now: a crackle is there too :(

Hopefully my last comment: In preferences/Raspberry Pi Configuration there should be a selection “Power Led activity/constant”.
This is not existing …

Any idea when the mono audio issue will be fixed?? I’m waiting on a couple of DeskPi Pro boxes to come in and I’d like to have everything ready for it when they get here.

It’s already fixed – if you do a sudo apt update / sudo apt full-upgrade now and then reboot, it will work correctly.

Is this switch to Pulse Audio going to mess up my DAW software like MusE, Reaper etc. that uses JACK and ALSA?

Possibly. Jack is supposedly compatible with PulseAudio, but we haven’t tested that, and SonicPi uses Jack and is known to have problems with Pulse. I’d recommend making a backup before trying it…

Further update to my no HDMI audio after update post. I managed to get everyone out of the way so I could connect the Pi4 to a 4k TV, Magic, HDMI audio worked perfectly, went back to the study, HDMI monitor with a audio extractor to an stereo amp and no sound, I had sound on both Pi’s (4/400) before the upgrade, after setting hdmi_drive=2, the setting is still in config.txt, but it looks like this setting is not working anymore, has anyone else had this? If so have you managed to fix the problem?

I can not get HDMI sound working on an older LG TV.
lg-42LV4400
It was working before the update.

Inside the Raspberry PI Configuration there is supposed to be a selection for the Power Led: constant or activity.
This selection is missing (I have a Raspi4 4GB)

This control is only shown on a device with a selectable power LED – the Pi 400 or one of the Pi Zero models. It’s not shown on a standard Pi 4 because that has independent power and activity LEDs anyway.

Thanks for the explanation :)

I am also very curious about a 64-bit os on the Pi4 with 8gb. There is a mention on the pi site itself about a gentoo 64-bit for the Pi that has been discontinued according to the person who was doing it – it’s right on their page. This leave 64-bit Ubuntu but I’ve read it’s slow on the Pi.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=275372

I had chrome running on v74 working perfectly with media edition. after full-upgrade, it updated to v84, YouTube videos and any other online videos are not playing now.

I tried to insert audio into Libre-Impress and make the audio play across few pages in the upgrade OS system. I found Impress constantly crashes (the PPT page instant frozen and never be able to move at all so that I have to shut down the power supply to get out) . Is there any suggestion for that? Thank you!

Thanks for the new update with PulseAudio. My bluetooth headset now connects reliably without disconnecting after 10~20 seconds. However, the volume-up/down/mute keys on my logitech keyboard stops working. Is there any settings that could restore the volume keys function?

Go into Appearance Settings, go to the Defaults tab, and choose any of the buttons to reset the appearance of the desktop to defaults; this will load new operations for the keyboard volume buttons which will then work properly with PulseAudio.

Thanks for your reply. But I have customized settings that I want to keep. Can you advise me the proper command to edit in the ‘/home/pi/.config/openbox/lxde-pi-rc.xml’ file please?
*****section from the lxde-pi-rc.xml file*****

lxpanelctl command volumealsabt volu

lxpanelctl command volumealsabt vold

lxpanelctl command volumealsabt mute

*************************

Have a look in /etc/xdg/openbox/lxde-pi-rc.xml – find the volume buttons in there and copy the relevant lines across. Searching for “lxpanelctl command” should find them.

It works! Thank you very much and really appreciate for your help.

I tried Raspberry Pi OS for desktop and I tried the python games, but tetris and the tetris for idiots didn’t work. It opened, but when I press a key, it closes automatically.
Does it happens in Raspberry Pi 4?

Those games work fine on a Pi; if you are running the x86 version, a crash on startup usually indicates a problem with the sound hardware on your computer; make sure you have selected an audio output device first (right-click the loudspeaker icon on the taskbar). If you have multiple audio devices, try them all and see which one works.

Where can I find the modified source code for chromium?

Unfortunately there seems to be a WiFi problem with the newest raspios version. I have two separate microSDs with the previous and current newest versions.
The older picks up all Wifi APs in my neighborhood (6 of 6), the newer one does not (2 of 6).
What is going on ?

Was the country code changed appropriately via Preferences > Pi Configuration > Localisation from the GUI. If using the command line, the same can be accessed with:
sudo raspi-config

Sooooo… Question… Why has it taken so long to ship chromium with playback of Netflix and other websites like that. Also, why has it taken so long to ship printer connectivity with the OS? It’s great that it finally does, but I’m just curious as to why it hasn’t in the past.

Adding support for Netflix etc requires a DRM library called Widevine, which Google include with Chrome, but not with Chromium, and we are not allowed to distribute it. It’s a legal issue rather than a technical one.

As for printers taking a long time – because we have a lot of stuff we need to do, and you would probably be surprised at how few people we have working on it. Put it this way – Microsoft or Apple probably have several hundred people doing what I do on my own…

I noticed that the Add/Remove Software program does not recognize the password updated during initial OS setup. The fix:
sudo passwd pi (enter this in terminal)
then enter the new password twice.
Well, given the extent of the changes, a few bugs must be expected. As for sound applications, I have found that a USB sound device can be inexpensive ($7 US) and effective, though not all of these work well. The best ones give results equivalent to the output of far more expensive DAC HATS.

For those wondering about Python: I just booted a fresh Lite image, and bad news: python3 is still 3.7.3 :-(

…which is the stable version included in current Debian releases, so that should be no surprise. We pull Python straight from Debian, so when they update it, we will also do so – and until they do, we don’t; pre-release versions of software are usually more trouble than they are worth. Bullseye, the next release of Debian which is in testing phase at the moment, includes Python 3.9, so when when Debian moves to it as the stable release – probably around the middle of 2021 – we will start shipping that version. We are unlikely to do so before then unless some compelling reason to do so becomes apparent, which is unlikely.

If you desperately need Python 3.9, there’s nothing stopping you from downloading and installing it from the Debian bullseye repository yourself.

Thank you for clarifying the reason behind being on that version. Lots of people are concerned because Home Assistant (a very popular home automation application) will stop supporting 3.7 on releases from now on, and will likely either have to build their own Python or consider alternative OSes – like Ubuntu, which is also based on Debian, yet tends to have more up-to-date Python packages (not sure about the Raspberry Pi variant though).

All the packages required to install Python 3.9 can be downloaded from https://packages.debian.org/ as pre-built armhf binaries which will install and run on Raspberry Pi; it’s a slightly fiddly process due to quite a lot of dependent packages needing to be installed, but can be done. But the very fiddliness of this is one reason why we wouldn’t ourselves take the risk of pulling in a bunch of pre-release packages which might destabilise the image.

To be honest, I am quite surprised that the developers of Home Assistant would orphan Python 3.7 while it is still the version available in Debian’s stable branch; that seems to me to be an unwise decision. I would hope they have reasons for it which are better than the (usually erroneous) belief that software with higher version numbers is automatically “better”…

Their (bizarre) policy is documented at https://github.com/home-assistant/architecture/blob/413e3cb248cf8dca766c0280997f3b516e23fb6d/adr/0002-minimum-supported-python-version.md if anyone is interested. I guess they like making extra support work for themselves.

hi, I have a python application that uses different subprocess commands to manage the sounds linked to events. (for example subprocess.run ([“sudo”, “amixer”, “-c”, card, “cset”, numid, volume_percentage].
What worries me is that updating the operating system may compromise the operation. No, I have the possibility to do some tests because my device is working and connected, can you give me any good news? Rewriting
the class and documentation would be frustrating for me :-(

On my Pi 4 B, after this update, I tested the stereo channels using several methods and they all showed that the left and right channels were reversed. My video setup includes an HDMI-to-VGA adapter plugged into an older monitor. This adapter separates the audio and outputs it through a 3.5 mm stereo audio jack into which I plug an old stereo amplified speaker set.

I verified that the amplifier and speakers were not causing the channel inversion by plugging them into my LG brand phone and playing several channel test files.

I don’t recall that the channels were reversed before the update. (I do remember running some kind of audio tests, but I’m not sure they included any for this issue.) So it might be the fault of my HDMI-to-VGA adapter.

Has anyone else had this problem of stereo channel reversal?

In case you did I found two ways to fix it. One was temporary and did not persist after rebooting:
https://rudd-o.com/linux-and-free-software/how-to-invert-left-and-right-sound-channels-on-the-fly
But, for me, this one was permanent (and required less fiddling):
https://askubuntu.com/questions/111523/how-can-you-reverse-left-and-right-speakers-from-a-control-panel

I’ve just checked this here (using speaker-test -c2), and I am definitely getting the left channel from the left speaker of my HDMI monitor, and vice-versa. So I suspect it may indeed be your HDMI to VGA adapter at fault.

Thank you for your response.
It looks like that is indeed the case. It’s a second-hand, unbranded model.

However, I investigated a bit further. Lacking a suitable plug for the 4-pole stereo audio and composite video port, I can’t test that output. But I played a channel test file with various players and settings. The results are consistent with the HDMI-to-VGA adapter as the cause.

y porqué Firefox ESR no funciona el audio después de actualizar? y cuando sale la versión de 64bits? y porque dejarón de funcionar las teclas multimedia de mi teclado al actualizar y todo esto es igual en cualquiera de las instalaciones que probé?

Hi, has anyone managed to get mpd (Music Player Daemon) outputting to a bluetooth headset/receiver etc since the change to Pulseaudio. Have tried everything I can find on the web but no joy!? The error is “ERROR: Failed to enable output “BTI-018″ (pulse); pa_context_connect() has failed: Connection refused”. The BTI-018 is my device name. I think its something to do with which groups mpd and pulse are in or something to do with specifying the pulseaudio sink in mpd.conf but its new territory for me and above my normal pay grade?. Any thoughts very welcome.

Hi Mike, you are very likely right.

mpd is usually running as a systemd service under it’s own user account i.e. not running as the pi user. While pulseaudio will normally be configured to run as the normal user i.e. the pi user. By default, pulseaudio server does not allow access from other users. This issue is also present in normal Ubuntu systems. You can read about how to solve it at https://askubuntu.com/questions/555103/mpd-with-pulseaudio#555484

Thanks Nick, I read that and several other bits and pieces. Got it working in the end. Made copious notes along the way so hopefully can repeat if required.

Hi Nick
The link to AskUbuntu you gave works… But:
there is a small bug: the pulse-cli-syntax accept hashmarks for comments only at the begining of the line!!! (sounds weird) [checked with “man pulse-cli-syntax”]
so:
load-module module-native-protocol-tcp auth-ip-acl=127.0.0.1 # IP of localhost
should replaced with:
load-module module-native-protocol-tcp auth-ip-acl=127.0.0.1

Thanks

I use a Raspi 3B+ in a headless installation. I do not use windows manager, I work completely on the command line.
With this update I am not even able to connect to my headphones (no headset!). Using bluetoothctl I can scan and apparently pair but not connect:

bluetoothctl
[bluetooth]# scan on
Discovery started
[CHG] Device FC:58:FA:CE:34:DF TxPower: 4
[bluetooth]# connect FC:58:FA:CE:34:DF
Attempting to connect to FC:58:FA:CE:34:DF
Failed to connect: org.bluez.Error.Failed
[bluetooth]# remove FC:58:FA:CE:34:DF
[DEL] Device FC:58:FA:CE:34:DF PuroQuiet
Device has been removed
[NEW] Device FC:58:FA:CE:34:DF PuroQuiet
[bluetooth]# pair FC:58:FA:CE:34:DF
Attempting to pair with FC:58:FA:CE:34:DF
[CHG] Device FC:58:FA:CE:34:DF Connected: yes
[CHG] Device FC:58:FA:CE:34:DF UUIDs: 00001108-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb
[CHG] Device FC:58:FA:CE:34:DF UUIDs: 0000110b-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb
[CHG] Device FC:58:FA:CE:34:DF UUIDs: 0000110c-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb
[CHG] Device FC:58:FA:CE:34:DF UUIDs: 0000110e-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb
[CHG] Device FC:58:FA:CE:34:DF UUIDs: 0000111e-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb
[CHG] Device FC:58:FA:CE:34:DF ServicesResolved: yes
[CHG] Device FC:58:FA:CE:34:DF Paired: yes
Pairing successful
[PuroQuiet]# connect FC:58:FA:CE:34:DF
Attempting to connect to FC:58:FA:CE:34:DF
Failed to connect: org.bluez.Error.Failed
[CHG] Device FC:58:FA:CE:34:DF ServicesResolved: no
[CHG] Device FC:58:FA:CE:34:DF Connected: no
[bluetooth]# paired-devices
Device FC:58:FA:CE:34:DF PuroQuiet
What am I doing wrong?
In the past the sequence of scan on, pair and connect worked fine…

Just found a solution for that: After issuing the following command it worked.

pulseaudio –start

Apparently pulseaudio was not started by default…

Definitely something is wrong with pulseaudio since I installed the new system does not have audio Firefox the multimedia keys of my keyboard do not work and when installing raspotify the audio is very low and of poor quality only works acceptable with the HDMI output it is a pity that something that it worked fine now it is unusable. I go back to the old version of the system that everything worked. :( OS: Raspbian GNU/Linux 10 (buster) armv7l Host: Raspberry Pi 4 Model B Rev 1.4 Kernel: 5.4.79-v7l+

The tricky thing is that now if I use HDMI for Raspotify and at the same time I put a video on YouTube with bluetooth enabled, they both sound at the same time, I don’t know what usefulness that can have now since before you could not use two outputs with ALSA but hey, I am going to try with the old version of the system and if everything works I stay with that one or use some other one as a delicacy that is 64Bits and everything works although I can’t use raspotify on it either.

Updated Raspberry pi 4 4G to latest, since then the HDMI audio has not worked.
Tried the alsamixer settings suggested here.
It seems that, both Analog and HDMI audio selection from top right audio menu will output the audio to Analog.

Running raspi-config, setting default audio to HDMI and then rebooting fixed the no audio from HDMI issue for me.
Thank you brainsys over at: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=294072&sid=9d62b83e723ab2088f6ebc5cf7096792

Hi,
I made the change on raspi-config to enable the text boot but it does’t work. Does anybody else tried this setting? Do you also have the problem?
Thank you,
Luis Sismeiro

Like a number of others posting, unable to get sound through HDMI when , for example, playing YouTube video. Also, the configuration menu has disappeared and raspi-config is missing… what’ s going on? What did I do wrong? Can I have the old OS back?

I seem to have the same issue. I am considering re-starting from a new flash image but somehow it sucks.

I have the same issue today. After updating the OS, no sound goes through the HDMI port. The jack is OK.
I even tried to flash a new microSD and thus restart from scratch: same thing.
I am on my way to flash a new card with an older version of the OS if I can find one, and then cross my fingers and wait for the next fix of the new OS.

I have upgrade my Raspberry Pi 3 to the latest OS. I am getting a warning which says ” Low Voltage warning. Please check your power supply”. I have no problem running my Raspi 3 on the previous OS with my power supply. Do I need to upgrade my power supply or should I continue to use an older OS?

The new OS shows more obvious voltage warnings; on older versions of the OS, they were just shown as an icon. If you are seeing that message, then your power supply is struggling to drive your Raspberry Pi properly and should be replaced with one with a higher current capacity.

Great work! I have done the updates and installed PulseAudio. I have 2 bluetooth speakers which I want to get stereo on, but can only get one to connect at a time. Can you help? Thanks in advance KC

Unfortunately, it is only possible to connect to a single Bluetooth audio device at a time. To get stereo from two different Bluetooth speakers would require some heavy customisation of the software, as this generally isn’t something Bluetooth devices support.

That’s disappointing, but thanks for your help

Before update:
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ vcgencmd bootloader_version
Sep 3 2020 13:11:43
Followed procedure:
sudo apt update, sudo apt full-upgrade, then reboot and…
After update:
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ vcgencmd bootloader_version
Sep 3 2020 13:11:43
NOTHING CHANGED???, I have tried several times with various support SD, USB stick, USB SSD: Same results.
Image of december release flashed with Pi Imager…or downloaded and flashed with balena-etcher…same resul.
Please tell me where/if I did something wrong?????
HUDGE THANKS

it might be helpful if you also included what you are expecting the output to be, Why do you think the bootloder version would have changed?

After applying the update I have lost all sound and youtube will not play saying ” if playback does not start try restarting your device “. I have also tried reflashing my SD card and it does exactly the same with the new OS image.

Is the addition of pulseaudio unique to the Desktop image or supposed to be present in the Lite image also? I just installed the latest Lite image and I’m pretty sure pulseaudio is not running and it’s directly using ALSA – exactly as before. Is this going to change so that we have everything working the same or do we need to configure some applications differently depending on ifusing Desktop or Lite flavour?

Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) is a software framework and part of the Linux kernel that provides an application programming interface (API) for sound card device drivers.

PulseAudio is a sound server which sits atop ALSA. The Command line software is pulseaudio-utils

Thanks for the reply but this doesn’t address my question in the slightest. I’m well aware what ALSA and pulseaudio are, I asked if we can expect to also get pulseaudio in the “Lite” version because that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Hmm…fresh install today on a 4B 4GB. Running Chromium 84 and Zoom is still really buggy. Most of the time it won’t let me connect to the meeting and once I do get connected, the video is really choppy. :(

In the next update you should definitely add bluetooth where

but the audio AV jack has a very low volume and I can’t figure out how to fix it, someone knows how?

Whatever you are plugging in is it amplified

The problem is not what I connect or if it is amplified or not, since before everything that connected was working is all the same, this happens or rather, it stopped working, since I installed the new operating system, it is not a problem of what that I connect. Before everything worked, now it no longer works or works badly.

I bought a rasp pi 400 for my son,he wanted the firefox browser installed.So the I had to do the sudo update/upgrade,Without it this is not possible and after that the Pi 400 was muted.The whole present is now useless.What a disappointment.He was so looking forward to it.It´s not broken so there is no warranty claim I can make.

We don’t recomend the use of Firefox. Leaving aside the audio issue you mention (which looks to be a bug in Firefox rather than anything in Raspberry Pi OS itself), Firefox is not optimised to use the Raspberry Pi’s hardware for accelerated video playback. This is why Chromium is the installed browser; I would be surprised if there are many sites which are accessible in Firefox that are not accessible in Chromium.

I am using firefox for a year now on my raspberry 4B witch had no problem at all.Altough some embedded video´s wont play.Even a clean iso flashed with scatcher card without firefox there is no sound coming from the 3.6mm or HDMI.I keep on trying to install it several ways.I can´t manage to work it out.I luckily made copy´s from the previous working updated card.When there is a update in the coming months we have to ¨update and upgrade¨and then the sound is muted ore wore ….gone.I hope it is solved in the coming weeks.I´m to deeply in love with the raspberry´s and raspbian os to leave it.I cant rest bevore everything works flawlessly as before.So I keep on puzzling out the problem until it is solved.Imagine a new shiney 400 under the christmastree that disappoints immediately after taken in use.after updating.But anyhow.Keep on trying and keep posting any progress,while there isn¨t many info on this subject on internet. Dreetings;Pausy

That is not true, I have used firefox in previous versions of the Raspberry Pi system and it worked without problems with videos and youtube, that stopped working when I updated to the new system. On the other hand, saying that firefox is not optimized is not true either, since I also used it in the 64-bit version of Manjaro and it works perfectly, I don’t know why they don’t want to admit that the update brought more problems than new things? so hard to admit that it doesn’t work or it works badly Hope they don’t remove the comment :(

> Firefox is not optimised to use the Raspberry Pi’s hardware for accelerated video playback.

That’s a fact. None of what you said changes that.

Nothing? not that it worked before and now it doesn’t? not to mention other systems that works very well? Are you also going to say that the sound problems that everyone has do not exist? sorry if it bothers someone what I say but it bothers me that a system that worked quite well is unusable due to a bad update and that is also a fact.

I tried for days to get audio out of my headphones after the update. Now I know all I need to do to use them is disconnect the second hdmi and reboot. Did the testers forget to test it with dual monitors and audio output?

Hi. I did the upgrade today on two raspberry pi (4GB and 8GB). The 4 GB was a fresh install, all is good.
On the 8GB, I have several problems.

– I had my NAS mounted on the Raspi filesystem, using ” sudo mount -t cifs -o user=,password=password,uid=1000,gid=1000,rw -o vers=1.0″. It was working fine (and is working on the Raspi 4GB). But now, I have “mount error: cifs filesystem not supported by the system
mount error(19): No such device
Refer to the mount.cifs(8) manual page (e.g. man mount.cifs)”.
” cat /proc/filesystems | grep cifs” returns nothing.
“sudo modprobe cifs” returns “modprobe: ERROR: ../libkmod/libkmod.c:586 kmod_search_moddep() could not open moddep file ‘/lib/modules/4.19.118-v7l+/modules.dep.bin’
modprobe: FATAL: Module cifs not found in directory /lib/modules/4.19.118-v7l+”
” find /lib/modules/ -name cifs” returns “/lib/modules/5.4.79-v8+/kernel/fs/cifs
/lib/modules/5.4.79-v7+/kernel/fs/cifs
/lib/modules/5.4.79-v7l+/kernel/fs/cifs
/lib/modules/5.4.79+/kernel/fs/cifs”
Of course, I did ” sudo apt install cifs-utils” before all that.

– I do not have the “Bluetooth” icon in my taskbar (even with add/remove : I can had “Bluetooth”, but nothing is added)

– Right clicking on the volume button shows “no audio devices found”.

I have none of those problems on the other Pi.

Please, help, I need access to the NAS.

Thanks.

Sorry, the command line is incomplet (a part disappeared) :
sudo mount -t cifs //SERVER/PATH\ WITH\ SPACE /LOCALPATH -o user=USERNAME,password=PASSWORD,uid=1000,gid=1000,rw -o vers=1.0

I have a RPi Zero W. Whit the last OS i have lost the audio device. How can i fix this ??

” … right-click a blank area on the taskbar and choose Add / Remove Panel Items … ”
How? I only have a stylus and a pressure sensitive 4-inch display

In that case, launch Appearance Settings from the main menu, go to the Defaults tab and choose one of the buttons to reset to default settings. Or you could manually edit the panel configuration file, but that takes rather more explaining…

Hello!
I don’t know, if it is because of this update, but I own a RPi 3B+, and after this update uvcvideo, didn’t want to modprobe anymore!
Thank you so much for your time!

I was using pulseaudio on a raspberry where there is retropie & kodi. With it the switch to bluetooth headset was automatic when connected. At headset switch off, the switch was automatic back to hdmi.
since the update, when I switch off the headset, the sound goes to the analog output instead the digital one. Even with “set-default-sink alsa_output.platform-bcm2835_audio.digital-stereo” into default.pa

Can’t figure out what is wrong.
A pulseaudio -k restore to sound to the correct output. pactl set-default-sink …digitil… doesn’t restore the sound immediatly. Strange.
Any idea ?

HDMI audio has not been working for me since updating an existing install on a RPI3B+.
Bluetooth audio works.
The headphone jack works.
I tried HDMI audio on a TV and a monitor, but neither worked.

The behaviour of pulseaudio looks strange since the update. Normally a pactl set-default-sink alsa_output.platform-bcm2835_audio.digital-stereo should switch the output to the hdmi. Since the update I have to stop play a media, enter the previous command, wait for the analog to become suspended and I can play the media with the output to hdmi audio.

Still no HDMI audio from VLC, Chromium, or system.
But, KODI works fine with HDMI audio.

Nice one – love the progress over the years of this OS!

— aside:
Couple of random thoughts: has any body done a “chain of fools upgrade” type video of all the Rasbian/Pi OS versions upgrading yet?
Will Pi OS ever have a startup sound? Might be nice to hold a competition for that one day? (Get Brian Eno to judge it even).

This morning i installed the latest updates for the Raspi Os, hoping that the horrible crackling when playing audio via bluetooth within kodi would disappear… No chance. As it is now, it is hard to listen to the audio when streaming videos inside Kodi…. And yes, when i updated the OS i followed ALL recommendations written above. This crackling is a pain …. . The new pulse-audio OS affects heavily the kodi sound. As it is i will go back to the pre-pulseaudio-update :(

Also ran into the analog audio as default problem after the update. One app I’ve used for years is pavucontrol:

sudo apt install pavucontrol

This is a GUI that provides and easy way to redirect audio to an audio output. This is done on a per app basis in the Playback tab of the UI. It can also be used to direct an audio input to an application (Recording tab).

I found that in Chromium when playing a video, having already set the output for Chromium to the HDMI output, that pausing the video caused the audio output to revert to the analog output. So far I have resolved this by selecting the Configuration tab and setting the lower Built-in Audio to Off. The upper selection of Built-in Audio is set to Digital Stereo Output.

I think this application should be installed by default on desktop systems where Pulse Audio is installed, but it isn’t and doesn’t seem to be all that well known. I have used this application on my various desktops for several years with good results.

Thanks for the pavucontrol tip. Looks useful.

After the upgrade of the existing image, as shown, Rpi only boots to command line. Using raspi-config to default to desktop and rebooting did not help.
Any ideas?

In order to get the better performance on YouTube, I made the Chromium upgrade, and performance is worse, speed as before.

cmu-flite text to speech has broken with this pulseaudio change.

1) Please can you give some consideration to having major changes like this in a rpiOS.dev release, so they can have their bugs ironed out before they go mainstream. I got this change via a routine ‘apt update/upgrade’, which killed my application – not fun.

2) Also, can you have old rpiOS releases available for download so, we can backout the change and go back to one that works.

3) A back-out procedure would be helpful to disable this change but get other security updates.

Thanks.

If they would have to give the possibility to install the new system or not and also to continue using ALSA because there are many people for whom nothing works since those changes, I totally agree with you. 1- that you can install a previous image without these changes 2- that you can choose which sound system to use, since many users have problems with the new one. They cannot consider something that leaves many applications without working as a good update. In the end it’s like going back to using Microsoft Windows and its terrifying updates that break everything. xD The Raspberry OS was beautiful before all this now I even use the raspi much less and that’s only because I use Manjaro which works better or I would stop using it. These things make me mad :(

They are still available, as they have always been, at https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspios_lite_armhf/images/

Just look in the parent folder of the latest image for whatever flavour (lite, desktop etc) you want.

I did a update/full-upgrade the sd card.I did,-sudo apt install pavucontrol-,overclocked to 1800Mhz,and after fiddling with the sound output it worked fine.Only thing lacking is that YT on Firefox is muted but on chromium everything works ok.I prefer Firefox over Chromium.On a new image you have to install Libreoffice yourself.What else is missing,so updating the existing card worked best for me.

Hi,
since the update PWM Audio does not work anymore.
I used dtoverlay=pwm 2chan,pin=18,func=2,pin2=13,func2=4 in /boot/config.txt but every command line audio tool now does not work anymore.

Errors like:
ALSA lib confmisc.c:767:(parse_card) cannot find card ‘0’
What can I do?

I found snd_bcm2835.enable_headphones=1 was removed from kernel commandline

so i added snd_bcm2835.enable_headphones=1 to /boot/cmdline.txt

maybe this helps someone else trying to find why pi zero output is not working anymore

The community only cares about one thing. When will the 64bits version be released?

Have you tried this latest release on a Raspberry Pi Zero? Since I upgraded mine (2 pieces) they are freezing so often as to be completely unusable. Same hardware works perfectly fine with the 2020-02-05 release. Just asking

Yes, I tested it on a Zero myself – didn’t notice any issues.

My pi zero is also freezing after Dec 2 update without leaving any trace in the log files

My pi zero is also freezing after Dec 2 update without leaving any trace in the log files.it usually happens when I open browser or try installing a package

There is an update for Firefox included in the sudo update/upgrade.But still no sound.I am now still forced to use chromium witch I wanted to escape from.Login isn´t needed for the use of Firefox.Chrome eventualy wants to know everything what size shoes i´m wearing.I´m ma it of dissapointed nos.Why did I bought a Raspbian in the first place was to get rid of the login antivirus ans so on.Was working very good until the Big Update.Time for a stiff drink.

P.S. No sound on Youtube on Firefox….I mean.sorry

The external HD is also not working anymore
after the update.

False alarm.HD Cable was broken.Pi = O.K.!

This update abolished my SSD OS- although the SD OS updated without problems. Can’t get the SSD to boot, so I’ll probably have to give up and load the new image.

I have a RPi4 8GB and I’ve got my headphones hooked up to the 3.5mm jack. I added the old volume mixer by mistake, and the sound was gone. So I fixed around with the mixer settings and thought I made sure that things were as they should be with output from the audio jack. But no, so then I revisited this and got the right volume mixer in my bar. But I still haven’t got any sound.

Okay, I’ve had a chance to play and here’s some initial thoughts on things that need to be addressed.

1. The change password dialog in the initial setup doesn’t work. It acts like it does, but the password is still ‘raspberry’ and when you later enable ‘ssh’ then it complains. A simple run of password fixed this, but it’s still annoying.
2. There’s no cursor focus in the set up dialogs, so you have to select to field before typing. As an example, when you set up WIFI, you select the SSID, and then you have to click the passphrase field, you can’t just type, even though it’s pretty clear which field needs to be focused.
3. If you finish the setup and then leave the reboot request dialog while you can a few others settings in raspi-config (enable SSH, change the hostname) and then click the reboot request that results in closing raspi-config, the systems doesn’t remember you’ve answered all the questions in the initial set-up and starts over. Presumably, it’s not setting the flag. Maybe this flag should be addressed before the reboot dialog appears so that the initial set up doesn’t start over again if you happen to reboot another way. The setup is done at this stage, so it’s not going to matter how you reboot.

Hope this helps streamline things a bit.

Hi
I’ve updated MicroSDs on 2 RPi 4s and a 3B plus, all with a bunch of FTDI devices connected through USB hubs, and the 3B seems OK but the 4s are having problems with scanning the USB devices and returning valid hwids etc. I see the ports there but no identifying info to know which port is which.
The problem seems related to the Dec OS update and also having more than a couple of devices connected through a hub, but all used to work before in the Oct release – here is my test code:
import serial.tools.list_ports

accepted = 0
ports = list(serial.tools.list_ports.comports())
for port in ports:
accepted += 1
print (“Virtual port ” + str(accepted) + “:”)
print (” device : %s” % port.device)
print (” name : %s” % port.name)
print (” description : %s” % port.description)
print (” hwid : %s” % port.hwid)
# print (” vid/pid : %04X:%04X” %(port.vid,port.pid))
print (” serial_number : %s” % port.serial_number)
print (” location : %s” % port.location)
print (” manufacturer : %s” % port.manufacturer)
print (” product : %s” % port.product)
print (” interface : %s\n” % port.interface)

print (“\nDone scanning USB ports %d devices accepted” % accepted)
And here is what I see on Pi v4 with Dec OS update (all 4 external devices look the same, internal /ttyAMA0 has a little bit more, so showing 3 – other V4 Pi same):
python findports.py
Virtual port 1:
device : /dev/ttyUSB1
name : ttyUSB1
description : n/a
hwid : n/a
serial_number : None
location : None
manufacturer : None
product : None
interface : None

Virtual port 2:
device : /dev/ttyUSB0
name : ttyUSB0
description : n/a
hwid : n/a
serial_number : None
location : None
manufacturer : None
product : None
interface : None
Virtual port 3:
device : /dev/ttyAMA0
name : ttyAMA0
description : ttyAMA0
hwid : fe201000.serial
serial_number : None
location : None
manufacturer : None
product : None
interface : None

Pi V3B looks like they all did before new OS:
python findports.py
Virtual port 1:
device : /dev/ttyUSB1
name : ttyUSB1
description : KMK116 – Optical Probe
hwid : USB VID:PID=0403:6001 SER=KMK116160411004 LOCATION=1-1.2.4
serial_number : KMK116160411004
location : 1-1.2.4
manufacturer : REDZ
product : KMK116 – Optical Probe
interface : None

Virtual port 2:
device : /dev/ttyUSB0
name : ttyUSB0
description : USB Serial
hwid : USB VID:PID=0403:6001 LOCATION=1-1.2.3
serial_number : None
location : 1-1.2.3
manufacturer : FTDI
product : USB Serial
interface : None
…
Virtual port 5:
device : /dev/ttyAMA0
name : ttyAMA0
description : ttyAMA0
hwid : 3f201000.serial
serial_number : None
location : None
manufacturer : None
product : None
interface : None

I tried just having a couple of devices plugged into the Hubs – which are powered – and that seemed ok, but by 3 devices result was above.

I tried usb-devices command too, V4 Pi results look problematic too:
usb-devices
/usr/bin/usb-devices: line 95: cd: /sys/bus/usb/devices/usb1: Permission denied
cat: busnum: No such file or directory
cat: devnum: No such file or directory
cat: speed: No such file or directory
cat: maxchild: No such file or directory

T: Bus=00 Lev=00 Prnt=00 Port=00 Cnt=00 Dev#= 0 Spd= MxCh= 0
cat: version: No such file or directory
cat: bDeviceClass: No such file or directory
cat: bDeviceSubClass: No such file or directory
cat: bDeviceProtocol: No such file or directory
cat: bMaxPacketSize0: No such file or directory
cat: bNumConfigurations: No such file or directory
D: Ver= Cls=() Sub= Prot= MxPS= 0 #Cfgs= 0
cat: idVendor: No such file or directory
cat: idProduct: No such file or directory
cat: bcdDevice: No such file or directory
cat: bcdDevice: No such file or directory
P: Vendor= ProdID= Rev=.
cat: bNumInterfaces: No such file or directory
cat: bConfigurationValue: No such file or directory
cat: bmAttributes: No such file or directory
cat: bMaxPower: No such file or directory
C: #Ifs= 0 Cfg#= 0 Atr= MxPwr=
cat: ‘/sys/bus/usb/devices/usb1/-*:?.*/bInterfaceNumber’: Permission denied
cat: ‘/sys/bus/usb/devices/usb1/-*:?.*/bAlternateSetting’: Permission denied
cat: ‘/sys/bus/usb/devices/usb1/-*:?.*/bNumEndpoints’: Permission denied
cat: ‘/sys/bus/usb/devices/usb1/-*:?.*/bInterfaceClass’: Permission denied
cat: ‘/sys/bus/usb/devices/usb1/-*:?.*/bInterfaceSubClass’: Permission denied
cat: ‘/sys/bus/usb/devices/usb1/-*:?.*/bInterfaceProtocol’: Permission denied
/usr/bin/usb-devices: line 76: printf: (none): invalid number
I: If#=0x Alt= 0 #EPs= 0 Cls=() Sub= Prot= Driver=

T: Bus=02 Lev=00 Prnt=00 Port=00 Cnt=00 Dev#= 1 Spd=5000 MxCh= 4
D: Ver= 3.00 Cls=09(hub ) Sub=00 Prot=03 MxPS= 9 #Cfgs= 1
P: Vendor=1d6b ProdID=0003 Rev=05.04
S: Manufacturer=Linux 5.4.79-v7l+ xhci-hcd
S: Product=xHCI Host Controller
S: SerialNumber=0000:01:00.0
C: #Ifs= 1 Cfg#= 1 Atr=e0 MxPwr=0mA
I: If#=0x0 Alt= 0 #EPs= 1 Cls=09(hub ) Sub=00 Prot=00 Driver=hub

T: Bus=02 Lev=01 Prnt=01 Port=01 Cnt=01 Dev#= 2 Spd=5000 MxCh= 4
D: Ver= 3.00 Cls=09(hub ) Sub=00 Prot=03 MxPS= 9 #Cfgs= 1
P: Vendor=2109 ProdID=0813 Rev=90.15
S: Manufacturer=VIA Labs, Inc.
S: Product=USB3.0 Hub
C: #Ifs= 1 Cfg#= 1 Atr=e0 MxPwr=0mA
I: If#=0x0 Alt= 0 #EPs= 1 Cls=09(hub ) Sub=00 Prot=00 Driver=hub

Whereas V3B Pi looked good:
usb-devices

T: Bus=01 Lev=00 Prnt=00 Port=00 Cnt=00 Dev#= 1 Spd=480 MxCh= 1
D: Ver= 2.00 Cls=09(hub ) Sub=00 Prot=01 MxPS=64 #Cfgs= 1
P: Vendor=1d6b ProdID=0002 Rev=05.04
S: Manufacturer=Linux 5.4.79-v7+ dwc_otg_hcd
S: Product=DWC OTG Controller
S: SerialNumber=3f980000.usb
C: #Ifs= 1 Cfg#= 1 Atr=e0 MxPwr=0mA
I: If#=0x0 Alt= 0 #EPs= 1 Cls=09(hub ) Sub=00 Prot=00 Driver=hub

T: Bus=01 Lev=01 Prnt=01 Port=00 Cnt=01 Dev#= 2 Spd=480 MxCh= 4
D: Ver= 2.00 Cls=09(hub ) Sub=00 Prot=02 MxPS=64 #Cfgs= 1
P: Vendor=0424 ProdID=2514 Rev=0b.b3
C: #Ifs= 1 Cfg#= 1 Atr=e0 MxPwr=2mA
I: If#=0x0 Alt= 1 #EPs= 1 Cls=09(hub ) Sub=00 Prot=02 Driver=hub

T: Bus=01 Lev=02 Prnt=02 Port=00 Cnt=01 Dev#= 3 Spd=480 MxCh= 3
D: Ver= 2.00 Cls=09(hub ) Sub=00 Prot=02 MxPS=64 #Cfgs= 1
P: Vendor=0424 ProdID=2514 Rev=0b.b3
C: #Ifs= 1 Cfg#= 1 Atr=e0 MxPwr=2mA
I: If#=0x0 Alt= 1 #EPs= 1 Cls=09(hub ) Sub=00 Prot=02 Driver=hub

T: Bus=01 Lev=03 Prnt=03 Port=00 Cnt=01 Dev#= 7 Spd=480 MxCh= 0
D: Ver= 2.10 Cls=ff(vend.) Sub=00 Prot=ff MxPS=64 #Cfgs= 1
P: Vendor=0424 ProdID=7800 Rev=03.00
C: #Ifs= 1 Cfg#= 1 Atr=e0 MxPwr=2mA
I: If#=0x0 Alt= 0 #EPs= 3 Cls=ff(vend.) Sub=00 Prot=ff Driver=lan78xx

T: Bus=01 Lev=03 Prnt=03 Port=02 Cnt=02 Dev#= 5 Spd=12 MxCh= 0
D: Ver= 2.00 Cls=00(>ifc ) Sub=00 Prot=00 MxPS=64 #Cfgs= 1
P: Vendor=1366 ProdID=0101 Rev=01.00
S: Manufacturer=SEGGER
S: Product=J-Link
S: SerialNumber=000801024976
C: #Ifs= 1 Cfg#= 1 Atr=80 MxPwr=100mA
I: If#=0x0 Alt= 0 #EPs= 2 Cls=ff(vend.) Sub=ff Prot=ff Driver=(none)

T: Bus=01 Lev=02 Prnt=02 Port=01 Cnt=02 Dev#= 4 Spd=480 MxCh= 4
D: Ver= 2.10 Cls=09(hub ) Sub=00 Prot=02 MxPS=64 #Cfgs= 1
P: Vendor=05e3 ProdID=0610 Rev=04.01
S: Manufacturer=GenesysLogic
S: Product=USB2.0 Hub
C: #Ifs= 1 Cfg#= 1 Atr=e0 MxPwr=100mA
I: If#=0x0 Alt= 1 #EPs= 1 Cls=09(hub ) Sub=00 Prot=02 Driver=hub

T: Bus=01 Lev=03 Prnt=04 Port=00 Cnt=01 Dev#= 6 Spd=12 MxCh= 0
D: Ver= 2.00 Cls=02(commc) Sub=00 Prot=00 MxPS= 8 #Cfgs= 1
P: Vendor=04d8 ProdID=ffee Rev=01.00
S: Manufacturer=Devantech ltd.
S: Product=USB-RLY02-SN
S: SerialNumber=000000E9
C: #Ifs= 2 Cfg#= 1 Atr=c0 MxPwr=100mA
I: If#=0x0 Alt= 0 #EPs= 1 Cls=02(commc) Sub=02 Prot=01 Driver=cdc_acm
I: If#=0x1 Alt= 0 #EPs= 2 Cls=0a(data ) Sub=00 Prot=00 Driver=cdc_acm

T: Bus=01 Lev=03 Prnt=04 Port=01 Cnt=02 Dev#= 8 Spd=12 MxCh= 0
D: Ver= 2.00 Cls=ef(misc ) Sub=02 Prot=01 MxPS=64 #Cfgs= 1
P: Vendor=0483 ProdID=374b Rev=01.00
S: Manufacturer=STMicroelectronics
S: Product=STM32 STLink
S: SerialNumber=0672FF383133524157181133
C: #Ifs= 4 Cfg#= 1 Atr=80 MxPwr=300mA
I: If#=0x0 Alt= 0 #EPs= 3 Cls=ff(vend.) Sub=ff Prot=ff Driver=(none)
I: If#=0x1 Alt= 0 #EPs= 2 Cls=08(stor.) Sub=06 Prot=50 Driver=usb-storage
I: If#=0x2 Alt= 0 #EPs= 1 Cls=02(commc) Sub=02 Prot=01 Driver=cdc_acm
I: If#=0x3 Alt= 0 #EPs= 2 Cls=0a(data ) Sub=00 Prot=00 Driver=cdc_acm

T: Bus=01 Lev=03 Prnt=04 Port=02 Cnt=03 Dev#= 9 Spd=12 MxCh= 0
D: Ver= 1.10 Cls=00(>ifc ) Sub=00 Prot=00 MxPS= 8 #Cfgs= 1
P: Vendor=0403 ProdID=6001 Rev=04.00
S: Manufacturer=FTDI
S: Product=USB Serial
C: #Ifs= 1 Cfg#= 1 Atr=c0 MxPwr=90mA
I: If#=0x0 Alt= 0 #EPs= 2 Cls=ff(vend.) Sub=ff Prot=ff Driver=ftdi_sio

T: Bus=01 Lev=03 Prnt=04 Port=03 Cnt=04 Dev#= 10 Spd=12 MxCh= 0
D: Ver= 2.00 Cls=00(>ifc ) Sub=00 Prot=00 MxPS= 8 #Cfgs= 1
P: Vendor=0403 ProdID=6001 Rev=06.00
S: Manufacturer=REDZ
S: Product=KMK116 – Optical Probe
S: SerialNumber=KMK116160411004
C: #Ifs= 1 Cfg#= 1 Atr=80 MxPwr=90mA
I: If#=0x0 Alt= 0 #EPs= 2 Cls=ff(vend.) Sub=ff Prot=ff Driver=ftdi_sio

So… any advice, or additional things I can test?
When I get a minute I’ll rebuild a previous release OS and retry, but I’ve been using the python -m serial.tools.list_ports -v for a while on the same configuration for the last 6 months and not seen this before.

Cheers
James

Update to my post from yesterday:
I have found that runnng the python script as sudo makes everything work on the 2 Pi v4s that were failing, and the output looks like the v3B Pi that still works normally. This gives me a workaround, so I can run sudo findports.py and write the ports to a file to use with other scripts, but is a bit of a nuisance!

So to recap, it seems with the December OS update, reading the USB port data, line name, hwids, description etc works for the first couple FTDI USB to Serial devices connected to a hub connected to the Pi, but on Pi V4s after 3 or so devices are connected the hwids and other details stop. The ports do work still, but I can’t use VID:PID info to determine which connection is which. A Pi V3B with the same OS update seems to work fine.
If I run the lsusb -t command, or usb-devices, or python script shown in yesterday’s message then I see problems on the Pi v4s, but run them as root with a sudo in front and they work as before.
Cheers
James

For the Firefox users.I found out by coinsidence that the sound on Youtube works well when volume control of youtube is set on is on 100%. not any lower,at 99& it´s muted.Everything works now.For me it working fine.But I´m now suspicious for the next updates.Make a couple of copies of your working SD cards!

am i the only-one with a very low sound with pavucontrol after this update?
another question: is it possible to lock your settings in pavucontrol?

this new raspi 400 update messed up ubuntu 20.10 so it won’t work more than a few hrs then it locks up and have to unplug it to reboot !!

hi, after automatic pulseaudio update with december buster image, i found file 91-pulseaudio-rpi.rules
breaks my google voice HAT. I had to remove it to get everything to work again. we discussed it here:https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/-/issues/1082#note_739014
where you can see all the pictures of how it was before and after the update.

I created a python file composed as follows:
import os
os.system (‘vlc test.wav &’)
later I created a launcher.sh file composed as follows:
/ home / pi / env / bin / python -u test-audio.py
finally I open the terminal and execute: sh launcher.sh
and the mp3 file is playing but i can’t control the volume. why?

Happy update to the year 2021 everybody!

i prefer alsa, so to stop pulseaudio
systemctl –user stop pulseaudio.socket
systemctl –user stop pulseaudio.service

to start pulseaudio (no need to reboot)
systemctl –user start pulseaudio.socket
systemctl –user start pulseaudio.service

Since i updated to the new os (with pulseaudio) the sound in Kodi, when played via Bluetooth became a real pain: crackling .. hissing ..It just happens in Kodi – in RaspiOS/VLC the sound is fine) But in Kodi: unbearable. But for the other features (e.g. chromium, cups…) i am thankful. So my question: How can i update to the ‘new’ os but without installing pulseaudio -or, if i have to install pulseaudio- how can i stop pulseaudio and keep my ‘pre-Pulseaudio-audio settings?

Thank you for sharing this useful information. Iam also working on a project based on raspberry pi.

There have been some bugs introduced with updates during the first week of January 2021. I did sudo apt update and then sudo apt upgrade and previous to doing so youtube was playing fine.
After the updates on 1/7/21 whenever I play a youtube video my Raspberry Pi 4 B 8GB freezes. I am not overclocking, GPU memory is set to the default of 76.
uname -a returns: Linux raspberrypi 5.4.83-v7l+ #1379 SMP Mon Dec 14 13:11:54 GMT 2020 armv7l GNU/Linux.
I rebooted to recovery and installed LibreELEC and after messing with it a bit went back and installed Raspberry Pi OS Full. I skipped updates initially and uname -a reported 5.4.79 and youtube played with out issue. I reran sudo apt update and then upgrade and after the updates finished Youtube was still good, until I rebooted. It is now back to 5.4.83-v7l+ #1379 SMP and youtube videos cause the pi to fully freeze in a few seconds.

Glen Grigsby

Am getting the exact same issue, except that it appears to be with all video (tested with VLC as well), not just YouTube.

Running a fresh install, video playback worked fine. Upgraded, and now any video playback freezes mere seconds in.

This is better than my first attempt to update, which somehow messed up my USB ports so that no peripherals would work, but still not ideal. I kept that install on a separate SD, and am working from a completely clean install.

today i updated the dec. OS, because nobody could fix my sound-problem and I hoped that the update should fix the sound-problem. but instead of that i got a freeze.
then i toke a new sd-card and made a fresh install and i got a freeze again.
so now i use the os prior to the dec.2020 OS. i was lucky i had another sd-card with that OS

because nobody reacts i finally find the solution myself:
install pimixer: sudo apt install pimixer.
open in terminal: pimixer
and the rest you can see for yourself.
problem solved
(thank you: https://youtu.be/E5qKk_2nMsA @ 14.45)

I am in Uganda how do I get the product

Hi David. I was going to advise clicking “Buy now” on the product you’re interested in on our product pages and then selecting “Rest of the world” from the drop-down menu, but for some reason that doesn’t show any results for some of our products – I think there’s a glitch somewhere here and I’ve asked my colleagues about it, so hopefully we can get that sorted soon. In the meantime, if you select “UK” it looks as though OKdo’s UK site will allow you to purchase things to ship to Uganda; I haven’t looked further but I imagine that some of our other Raspberry Pi Approved Resellers in various parts of the world will offer shipping to you as well.

After the upgrade HDMI is no longer listed as an output in the volume control (Pulse) on my Pi4, only Jack AV is listed. However, aplay -l still lists it and I can play audio through HDMI but explicit commands like mplayer … device=hw:0,0. So:
$ aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: b1 [bcm2835 HDMI 1], device 0: bcm2835 HDMI 1 [bcm2835 HDMI 1]
Subdevices: 3/4
…
card 1: Headphones [bcm2835 Headphones], device 0: bcm2835 Headphones [bcm2835 Headphones]
Subdevices: 4/4
…

But:
$ pacmd list-sinks
1 sink(s) available.
* index: 0
name:
driver:

So somehow alsa is picking it up but pulse is not. Which seems odd. Maybe I can work around this by editing default.pa but I’d really like to find out why the normal initialisation isn’t working. This may be the same problem as *some* of the people who have “lost” HDMI audio above are reporting.

Proofreading last comment:
1: “but only with explicit commands like mplayer … device=hw:0,0″
2: “$ pacmd list-sinks
1 sink(s) available.
* index: 0
name: alsa_output.platform-bcm2835_audio.analog-stereo
driver: module-alsa-card.c”
[So only the headphone jack]

Hi,
My son has rpi3 for about 2 years and I am updating it regularly. And we are very satisfy with it.
I did buy rpi4 4GB for daughter for Christmas. I did install latest raspeberry pi os with desktop and recommended software.
RPI4 is laggy. Sometimes it hang up during minecraft, or opening new tab in chromium is taking longer time and it is strange, clicking to url edit box and start to write address there is cca 1second delay between I hit keyboard and letter is shown. That is not happening on RPI3. I did check both OS and we have same version and also kernel is same.
I decide to flash ubuntu desktop to another SD and make a test in RPI4. And I am pretty surprised. It is working very well, no lags, firefox response imediately, youtube play OK …

question: what is wrong with Raspberry OS on my rpi4?
thanks for any tips which can help me improve it.

I am replaying to my self. I find out a problem.
I was using kingstone SD card 32GB so I decided to use sandisk 16GB with same specification and that works very well.

Try run the Raspberry Pi Diagnostics (From the Acessories group) to test your Kingston SD Card.

the automatic removal of .asoundrc at the start of desktop my app to not work as it looks for software volume control define in .asoundrc. a can the removal be disabled or is there a pulseaudio feature that will allow to define a software voulme control as in .asoundrc?

I use a Sabra speak 710 bluetooth speaker/Microfone for videoconferencing.
The device has besides the HFP profile an A2DP profile for the microphone AND the speaker, therefore I’m missing the A2DP input profile in pulsaudio.
I was able to use A2DP input with Alsa before.
The voice quality with HFP is really limiting the experience of Zoom or Jitsi calls, if you use a large screen with full-HD resolution

Where to buy original raspberry pi, I found all duplicate boards in market.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/

Well I now can’t listen to my Pi after today’s full update. I use a powered amp off the 3.5mm audio socket. with the amp full up and the Pi set to 100% the setup barely whispers. No use at all. Can I boost the socket audio output in software. It worked fine on the previous Noobs version. Can’t use the machine to watch YouTube or anything else with this set up now.

I’ve also got the same problem – even when the audio volume is set to 100%, the analogue output via the 3.5mm jack is barely audible via my external amplifier. It worked fine before the latest update (I use my pi to listen to radio streams a lot so this issue is a major problem for me). The volume of the output via HDMI is fine however.

Try this; https://youtu.be/E5qKk_2nMsA?t=1143 for radiostreams and video/tv I use a Pi 3 with osmc.

Thank you. I really only use my Pi to listen to radio
streams via VLC Player or Chromium, but, the video would be interesting for anyone wanting to stream their own video or audio.

Surely it is not possible that the low analogue volume issue reported by myself and one other user has not been experienced by anyone else. I firmly believe that somewhere along the recent line of updates the audio output has been “tweaked”, since when this problem has come about. At the start of this month (February 2021) the analogue audio volume via the 3.5mm jack was fine – now it isn’t – it’s way too low to be usable.

Possibly related to the above, Sonic Pi, which I had at last got working on the December 2020 Raspberry Pi OS, has now stopped working again.

The amount of stations is way more bigger then on VLC when using OSMC,you don´t need a browser or VLC for audio.The stations you are used too are also to receive. The Raspbian audio problems are solvable it is in the last part of the video. it´s switched from alsa to pulse audio.Puzzle audio is a more suitable name.When it works…make a copy of your card.

Thanks again.

This is really weird, but each time I click on your link, I’m taken to a different YouTube video.

I really want someone to explain why it is that the volume of the HDMI digital sound output is fine, yet the analogue sound output via the 3.5mm jack is way too low. Can anyone come up with a mechanism that could lead to that? Has there been a recent update of the sound settings that might explain it?

Also, why is it that the analogue sound via the 3.5mm jack was fine a couple of weeks ago, but now it’s so low as to be almost inaudible even with my (powerful) amplifier turned up to full volume. The only thing that has changed is that I have updated and upgraded all packages that were recommended.

The analog audio / sound (3.5mm headphone) still doesn’t work per February 15th 21.

The only useful workaround is to downgrade and use the kernel 4.19.118 from May 2020 found here: http://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspios_armhf/images/raspios_armhf-2020-05-28/

This one works fantastic out the box. Every other solution doesn’t work properly on the analogue output.

I have several Pi’s, both 3, 3+ and 4 (running both 32 and 64 bit) and wasting days for digging this problem.
Next time you do such a huge change please send it to test first, That would be the difference of having a toy or something in 24h production as my pi’s are for web radios and presentations.

I could buy a converter from HDMI but the last three years of improvement seems to be a setback if that should be necessary.

Apart from that: its good there are innovation and I’m sure when you got the dynamic sound back on the analogue port too Pulseaudio will be an improvement in the long run.
/Peter

I have the lasted image installed… using pulse… but some bluetooth hands free microphone devices works and other doesn’t … (all of them are “low cost” device)… I can´t figure out which feature do I need to request to my bluetooth device to works fine with Raspian from 2021-01-11.

Thanks!
Eduardo

I did a dist-upgrade in january on a RPI4 and the pulseaudio changes caused omxplayer to start stuttering and emitting “[0xab702908] omxalsasink_worker: alsa error: -32: Broken pipe” and omxplayer would skip and render the player unusable. I tried upgrading the system to use pulseaudio and now I can get sound for VLC or omxplayer or chrome (jitsi) but not all of them with the same set of configurations. Is there a way to roll back the changes?
If I try to install from scratch, how do I prevent these latest changes (Dec 4) from being re-applied as soon as the re-installation goes looking for updates?
the system is in a nursing home, so I can’t get in there very easy to do troubleshooting. Now my 91 year old mother can’t watch videos of the great grandchildren or do any video conferencing to talk to us.
Thanks for any assistance
Ole Jensen

I just rebuilt my RPI4 with the Jan 11 2021 version of Buster. I selected the avjack as sound output, and a usb microphone as sound input. I disabled hdmi sound output (because my monitor does not have sound) and also disabled the USB sound output so it wouldn’t be selected by accident. I tried to play a video with “omxplayer -o local Test.mkv” with the configuration as it comes out of the box (except as noted above). When I ran the video, the sound was at maximum. I tried using the volume control to lower the volume and the volume did not change. I tried changing the volume with pavucontrol and it had no effect. I tried muting using the volume control and pavucontrol but neither had any effect.
Does anyone have any idea what the problem might be? Was I supposed to alter any other configurations before trying to use pulseaudio and omxplayer?
Thanks for any assistance,
Ole Jensen.

Hi, isn’t there a way to have the option to select the Audio system manually? There is a lot of software that is relying on JACK (like SuperCollider and PD). Right now it seems to be very problematic…

Feature request for 2021 :-) Could we have hibernate as an option please? (Pi’s sip power so suspend seems a bit redundant). I appreciate it should be off by default as it would fry SD cards pretty. I’m running a Raspberry Pi 400 on an SSD and a Pi 3B with an HDD and run a number of use-cases that would really benefit from the ability to hibernate.

HI,
i followed thru all the steps mentioned and yet the Bluetooth Microphone wouldnt work…i cannot hear during phone calls tho the device profile is set to HSP.
I then loaded the latest OS version using Imager 1.6exe to start on a clean slate…..the problem still persists..Bluetooth Mic does not work
Would appreciate some help to fix this problem asap

Simon I adore Raspberry Pi OS and appreciate all you have done! I love your Introduction to C & GUI Programming, and I have had little or no issue with the Gtk3 vs Gtk2 others have complained about.
In fact in your book, when you say to install Gtk2, I just used the same command, changing any 2 to a 3 as in:
sudo apt-get install libgtk3.0-dev
This worked perfectly, but with the release of Gtk4, I find that there is no Gtk4 package, and we are told to do a build ourselves, which appears complicated to me and seems redundant for all debian developers to have to do this.
Any suggestions?
Regards,
Roark

Comments are closed

News

Chromium

PulseAudio

Printing

Accessibility

New hardware options

How do I get it?

Updates

Related posts

New product: Raspberry Pi 4 Case Fan

Introducing Raspberry Pi Imager, our new imaging utility

Next Post

Recreate Tiger-Heli’s bomb mechanic | Wireframe #45

Previous Post

Designing the Raspberry Pi Case Fan

Share this post

412 comments

Serge Schneider

Sykobee

Sykobee

Blinker

Sykobee

Rick Roberts

Ian

Maik

Siddharth

Paul Salmon

Serge Schneider

Cederick

Serge Schneider

fanoush

Harry Hardjono

Tim ffitch

Gumby2

Darren Kinahan-Goodwin

Jack

uride

Peter Francis

MW

Peter Francis

Luciano

Jayaprakash Saththasivam

Luciano

Luciano

Ronald Riggs

Michael Mumford

Alexander Freese

PMV

Puffergas

Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author

Sergio Esaù Aràmbula Duràn

Sergio Esaù Aràmbula Duràn

W. H. Heydt

Matha Goram

Martin

Sergio Esaù Aràmbula Duràn

Brian Lewis

Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author

marco

Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author

marco

AndrewS

Paul Perkins

Scott

Thomas Marshall

Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author

Jayaprakash Saththasivam

Prakash Kumar

Bartłomiej

beta-tester

Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author

raymond house

Jayaprakash Saththasivam

Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author

Jayaprakash Saththasivam

hill

Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author

Martin Bone

Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author

Jack