Linux Audio Troubleshooting

[YCG]

Linux audio has been an adventure! While we always strive to have everything running right from the get go, we've had our fair share of bugs too! To help in the process we have a few new configuration options available.

Sometimes the audio device is mapped incorrectly. Let's step through how you can go about changing the audio device yourself, and set it so that the game always runs with the new audio settings.

To start you'll want to run Shovel Knight from a command line to quickly test different settings and see console output.

On my Mint install starting up the game from a command line and exiting looks like this:
http://www.yachtclubgames.com/sync/linux-cmd-line-run.png
(your installation directory may vary, and you'll want '32' instead of '64' if you're on 32 bit Linux)

The output has plenty of programmer-y debug spew, but for now we're after the "Audio Drivers" bit.

On my system, the sound library defaulted to PulseAudio and selected the default output device. This works fine for me, but let's try changing it:
http://www.yachtclubgames.com/sync/linux-alsa.png
(possible values for SDL_AUDIODRIVER: alsa, pulse, pulseaudio, esd, oss, dma, dsp)

The game is now using ALSA... but the sound is corrupt! I'll adjust the FMOD_DRIVERNUM variable to select the
"sysdefault:CARD=AudioPCI" device:
http://www.yachtclubgames.com/sync/linux-fmod-drivernum.png

The game runs and sounds good! Now that I've found a good combination of settings, I'll need to add those export
commands to my ~./bashrc:
echo "export SDL_AUDIODRIVER=alsa" >> ~/.bashrc
echo "export FMOD_DRIVERNUM=3" >> ~/.bashrc

When I run Shovel Knight from Steam, the game can now see my changes (you may have to restart, or re-login for ~/.bashrc changes to take effect).

Now the seamless scything can begin!

(As always, a big thank you to the Linux SK community! Your willingness to help us debug issues has been a huge help!)