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I'm new to the Raspberry Pi. I hooked up some speakers to the audio jack and was able to play a few wave files. Then I did some programming to test out a few things (downloaded script from some tutorials which downloaded from git). Once out of terminal mode and back to desktop my wave files will no longer work - they run but no sound from speakers?

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If I recall correctly the action of starting up the GUI will also initialise some sound functionality (possibly pulseaudio) which may not be happening for a Linux terminal (a.k.a. console) mode login. It may also be that a mixer is being loaded for the Desktop mode which happens to have audio muted or the volume turned to minimum - have you found a volume/mixer control to check this with?

A quick check got me alsaplayer that runs on the GUI and has built in volume (and balance) controls which does work the audio system (I am running remotely with the GUI displayed on a Xephyr :1 -ac -once -screen 1024x768 & nested X server on my Linux PC Desktop running the metacity window manager and then the startlxde script in the background from a ssh -Y session into the RPi once I set export DISPLAY=:1.0 correctly.) I was also able to use aplay from the command line of the ssh session - but as I was using an old single processor RPi B I am not sure that the difficulty I had in getting both to play at the same time was down to lack of processor cycles or not.

Interestingly using the alsa mixer on the Desktop reported that the device "card" and "chip" being used were both "pulseaudio" as I expected which is capable of mixing multiple audio streams into one (or more) possibly networked sound sinks so my initial surmise about it being started up will be worth checking to see when it happens...

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