Re: esound (woody) broken?

[Thomas Hood <thood@mailexcite.com>]

> Oh, well... I can play mp3s here. What are you using to play them? In
> xmms, try chosing the OSS driver instead of esound.
> 
> The only thing that's not working here is esound.
> BTW, I'm running woody.

GNOME plays sounds through esd.  If esd is not running,
and sound is enabled in GNOME, and an app issues a sound, then
GNOME pauses or hangs up.  So one wants esd to be running.

I had a problem getting esd running.  After a day of tinkering
I discovered that the problem was that my loopback device was
not configured.  The solution was to do "ifconfig lo 127.0.0.1".

esd accesses the sound hardware through the special device files.
(I guess the exact file depends upon whether you are using the
"esound" or the "esound-alsa" package.)  I found that when I
ran xmms with the OSS or ALSA output plugin, so that it was
accessing the sound hardware directly through these files, 
esd and in turn GNOME would be blocked.  But when I selected
the esound output plug for xmms the problem went away.  The
purpose of esd, after all, is to allow multiple processes to
access the sound hardware simultaneously without blocking one
another.

Thomas Hood