In view the fact that the first thing everybody advised me to do was to
disable artsd. On examination I found out that artsd is a KDE creation
which wants to monopolize all sound operations to the exclusion of all
others, even others part of the KDE empire, such as KsCD and Kaffeine.
noatun and kaffeine use artsd if kde is asked to run it as sound deamon.
It was then a simple matter to disable artsd as suggested by Nigel Henry
(NH) by unchecking the "Enable the sound system" box in KDE's control
centre/Sound and Multimedia/Sound system. For good measure I ran as
suggested by ASW "killall artsd", which produced a null return.
Also, as suggested by NH, I ran "cat /proc/asound/cards", which returned
the following:
0 [OPL3SA23 ]: OPL3SA2 - Yamaha OPL3-SA23
Yamaha OPL3-SA23 at 0x538, irq 5, dma 1&0
(Yes, Raffaele Morelli, I do need to educate myself about killing
processes as you suggested. Hitherto I have never felt the need to kill
anything but pesky insects. That exercise is however for another time.)
As being far away to be a geek but still far away to be lazy , I always feel the need to educate myself too.
Then, as previously suggested by ASW, I ran "aplay
/usr/share/sounds/alsa/*.wav". Lo and behold, I was greeted with a
series of words: "front and centre", "keep right", and several others in
the same vein.
Try cat /dev/urandom | aplay
I was then given five options: open in a new window, extract and encode
audio tracks, play, play CD with Kaffeine and do nothing. I first chose
the simplest, play, which I discovered opened the KsCD window. However,
I was unable to play. (Before I made all the changes described above, I
had tried to use noatun, with the same result.) So, I closed the KsCD
window, went back to the Audio CD KDE daemon window, chose "do nothing"
and closed that window. I was then able to eject the disk.
I then reinserted the Audio CD. When in due course I got the Audio CD
KDE daemon I chose the Kaffeine option. To my shock and amazement the
CD started to play. The sound was also accompanied by fireworks, sun
spots and similar kaleidoscopic visuals on the screen. I am sure the
additional memory required for these inhibited the smooth functioning of
the audio, as there were frequent short gaps in the audio continuity.
In my experience Kaffeine and noatun are far to be a good players, install xmms, is a full featured and best player I saw around.
If you look for essential, alsaplayer is the one for you.
I then tried a telecast using Kaffeine. I got the audio but not the video.
The major lesson I have drawn from this experience it that there is a
plethora of audio (and video?) applications vying for the custom of my
laptop. One in particular (arts) seems to have the power to exclude all
the others, but then misuses this power by denying any audio (and
video?) at all.
I consequently wonder whether any other sound application is
sufficiently powerful to exclude all others, such as KsCD and noatun,
but not Kaffeine. It was with this possibility in view I included the
following two paragraphs two posts ago:
You don't need such application, you need to prevent artsd from running, exluding it from kde or removing it and you did it.
Now I think you're facing only a configuration problem and that dosemu is innocent.
Regards,
Ken Heard
regards
raffaele