No sound notification in KDE Plasma Desktop

Question

I installed the KDE plasma desktop yesterday on my Ubuntu 14.04 system. The environment has been working quite well up until now.

However, I just noticed that there was no Sound notification icon in the panel.

Although the sound seems to be working, it's very faint. Even after adjusting the volume from System Settings->Notifications->Player Settings and increasing it to 100% the sound remains faint.

How do I restore the notification area sound indicator and fix the volume problem?

P.S. This problem is only on the KDE environment. Sound is working just fine on GNOME.

Answer 1

Starting Plasma 5.4 the new plasma-pa package was introduced to replace kmix.

Remove kmix, install plasma-pa and restart plasmashell to see changes:

sudo apt-get remove kmix
sudo apt-get install plasma-pa
killall plasmashell
plasmashell &

Answer 2

Make sure that kmix is installed.

Just so you know - if you want to install KDE on a system that didn't come with it, it is best to install a transitional package like kubuntu-desktop, kde-standard, or kde-full. This way you don't have to worry about missing components.

Answer 3

I had lost my visual notification when turning my volume up/down right after an upgrade. After reading this I saw that kmix was no longer installed. I took a shot in the dark and decided to see if it would let me install it on top of plasma-pa, and voila! Literally 3 seconds after the completion of apt installing kmix I tapped my volume buttons and the visual notification was back! No complaining from apt that plasma-pa was already installed it just installed kmix alone and BOOM, my volume meter is back..

HTH anyone who had a similar issue.

Karl Haines