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Re: sound card weirdness? newbie question



This one time, at band camp, Rohan Nicholls said:
> Hi all,
> 
> I have finally made the full switch to linux, with windows running in an 
> emulator for company oriented stuff, and I was very impressed with the 
> improvements from potato as far as installing on my laptop, but as 
> always I have questions.:)
> 
> I have my soundcard supported but when I start two applications that 
> want the sound card there seems to be conflicts, so say I am using xmms 
> to play mp3's and I browse to a web page that needs flash, the browser 
> freezes up until I stop what ever is playing and then once the page is 
> loaded I can continue the music.  To add to the confusion, if I am 
> playing a cd there is no problem, but then I don't think I am accessing 
> the sound server, because I can't set equalizer settings etc.  It does 
> not matter what programs I am using ie. realplayer, xmms, browsers with 
> flash support if one is operating the other is frozen (I assume while it 
> waits for the sound resources to open up.)
> 
> I am running on a dell latitude laptop with a Maestro3 soundcard.  I was 
> using gnome, but found kde handled switching between sound using 
> applications better so I am using that now, with gnome I had to 
> completely close down the application.  But it is annoying in both and I 
> would love some help in figuring out how to fix this.
> 
> I know little about the different sound servers, and what I have read 
> just confuses me more, but I have run into references that the different 
> sound servers don't play well together. I am wondering if these 
> different apps are using different servers (I also shut down the system 
> sounds which helped), and I need to configure them to all use the same 
> server?

You have it basically correct.  There are two sound servers that these
apps and desktops use - esd and arts.  The KDE stuff all uses arts, and
the GNOME stuff (and xmms) use esd.  That said, I have never had the
problem you're describing.  If I'm in a GNOME session, I just have o
remember to make all my sound apps (xmms, realplayer, etc) use esd, and
then they coexist fine.  Same for KDE, last time I used the full desktop
environment at any rate.

In the absence of any further debugging info, look in the options or
prefernces settings of the various apps, and see if there is a way to
get them to use esd (as a start - I know xmms and realplayer have this
option), and see if they'll play at the same time.  Let us know, and
maybe dig around in your logs to see if you can find any error messages
that may be helpful.
-- 
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|  Stephen Gran                  | <Ze0> so, how's everything in the world |
|  steve@lobefin.net             | of Quack? <LordHavoc> just ducky <Ze0>  |
|  http://www.lobefin.net/~steve | excellent, fried duck is mighty fine    |
|  			         | tasty.                                  |
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