Re: Unblocking sound card, or adding stream (newbie)
On Friday 07 September 2007 05:30, Dr. Jennifer Nussbaum wrote:
> I have a laptop with a sound card that only supports a
> single stream. (People on #debian helped me figure
> this out.) This is annoying not because i want to play
> twelve different sypmhonies at once through high-def
> systems, but just so i can listen to music while
> getting beeps from Gaim, or whatever.
>
> If theres no way to do this, bummer i guess. But my
> problem is that sometimes i seem to have something
> blocking the sound card and i cant figure out what it
> is. I dont THINK im running any sound thing ,but then
> if i try to run xmms i get a "something's blocking
> your sound card" message, or if i play a YouTube video
> i just get no sound at all.
>
> When this happens, how do i find out what's blocking
> hte sound card, and how do i kill this so i can play
> what i want?
>
> Thanks.
>
> Jen
I've had this problem with a soundcard on one of my 2 machines that isn't
capable of dealing with multiple audio streams.
As an example I start Gaim, and at the same time am listening to Internet
radio, which uses the realplayer plugin. The radio is ok, and I'm chatting
away on Gaim, but getting no sounds from Gaim.
I now close Opera which is connected to the Internet radio, and all the sounds
from my conversion on Gaim start to play. A bit weird. They have all been
stacked up, and play one after the other.
The way around it for me, is to install the alsa-oss package, and start Opera
as.
aoss opera
Now I can listen to Internet radio, and get the Gaim sounds, or play another
music app at the same time as the radio is playing.
To see what is grabbing the soundcard you can run:
/usr/sbin/lsof -n | grep /dev/dsp
Other suspects are. On Gnome the ESD sound server, and on KDE the ArtS
soundserver. I use KDE, and always disable the ArtS sound server on the
machine that has the Ensoniq card (ens1371 driver)
My other machine has an Audigy2 soundblaster (emu10k1), and is capable of
handling multiple audio streams. I can play as many music apps as I want to
at a time on this card. You may find one of these on E-bay, but make sure
it's one that uses the emu10k1 driver.
Xmms works ok for me on both machines, but I tried to help someone resolve
their Xmms problem on the French Debian list to no avail. I normally use
MhWaveedit for playing my music, and that works fine on both machines, but
can't say I'm too clued up on Xmms problems.
Just a few suggestions.
Nigel.
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