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.