Banshee suddenly stopped playing music - how do I get it working again?

Question

Suddenly I can't play music in Banshee 2.0. Just suddenly stopped working today.

I reinstalled Banshee and Gstreamer, but that hasn't helped.

Searching on Google, the [Error 14:13:13.192] GStreamer core error: StateChange error has come up a lot, and a lot of people reported it as a bug, but I found no corrections or fixes that I could apply.

What do I do to get Banshee to play again?

Here is a section of the stream of errors I got when I ran Banshee from the command line:

[Info  14:12:49.083] [Streamrecorder.Gst.Marshaller] gstreamer version found: GStreamer 0.10.32
Cannot connect to server socket err = No such file or directory
Cannot connect to server socket
jack server is not running or cannot be started
bpm_detect got error: Could not open file "song.mp3" for reading. gstfilesrc.c(1039): gst_file_src_start (): /GstPipeline:pipeline/GstFileSrc:filesrc:
system error: Permission denied
[Warn  14:12:51.417] Asked to invalidate 0+0,0x0 for Hyena.Data.Gui.ColumnCellRating but no CanvasManager!
[Error 14:13:13.192] GStreamer core error: StateChange
Cannot connect to server socket err = No such file or directory
Cannot connect to server socket
jack server is not running or cannot be started
[Error 14:13:14.545] GStreamer core error: StateChange
[Warn  14:13:14.567] Service disposal (MprisService) threw an exception - System.ArgumentNullException: Argument cannot be null.

Answer 1

Thanks for the tip on testing with other media players. Sometimes you need a reminder to do the obvious troubleshooting steps.

VLC also didn't work but gave me a slightly more informative error, saying that the audio device was not present.

A little Googling led to this command:

sudo alsa force-reload

... which solved the problem.