KAlarm issues with playing sounds or audio

I have a fairly recent issue with KAlarm, though I noticed for around a week it has had a tendency to stop responding and freeze.

So to present this problem:
Starting up KAlarm in the terminal brings a warning:

org.kde.pim.kalarm: Kernel alarm timers not available (no CAP_WAKE_ALARM capability)

The window presents itself, however, and then the most interesting alarms are those which give sound alerts…

So selecting the School pickup alarm - presents the window as expected.

I have a sound file selected (which works - and was working before), so I think selecting ‘Try’ should present 1. The alert window/text and 2. Play the sound file.

What actually happens is that I get an Error window stating that there’s an error playing the file.

Interestingly, THE FILE IS NOW PLAYING and will stop playingi if I kill the terminal hosting KAlarm.

Previously I noticed the alarms were silent… and upon doing this same action a second time as I write this, I see the text alert and a simple error:

org.kde.pim.kalarm: AudioPlayer::play: Failed to play sound with VLC: "/home/ben/Audio/Alerts-home/Java Jive - Manhatten Transfer.opus"
[00007c239400d040] cache_read stream error: cannot pre fill buffer
[00007c2394022320] mjpeg demux error: cannot peek

To be clear, the file is fine - it plays normally and I have also tried others and tested it with VLC (the backend for KAlarm).

Operating System: Manjaro Linux 
KDE Plasma Version: 6.1.5
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.5.0
Qt Version: 6.7.2
Kernel Version: 6.10.10-5-MANJARO (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 12 × AMD Ryzen 5 5600G with Radeon Graphics
Memory: 15.0 GiB of RAM
Graphics Processor: AMD Radeon Graphics
Product Name: B550M Steel Legend

What’s next?

I’m an Arch user, and I’ve had this problem too. My solution is to downgrade to the previous version:

warning: downgrading package kalarm (24.08.1-1 => 24.08.0-1)

1 Like
  1. yay downgrade (available in extra)
  2. doas downgrade kalarm

Cheers, this works nicely.

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=493128

No response in here yet.

This has now been fixed for KAlarm version 3.9.2, which will be in KDE Gear 24.08.2. The bug didn’t happen on all systems - VLC seems to throw up some unexpected behaviour sometimes!

1 Like

Thank you for the update - I guess I’ll hang on until it makes it through to Manjaro testing branch.