[lug] Linux sound or lack thereof

[Daniel Webb]

On Thu, 9 Sep 2004, Paul E Condon wrote:

> > Can you play other sounds in KDE other than the startup?  If you have a folder
>
> I wouldn't know whether or not I have such a folder. The only way I would have
> such is if the Debian install had put it somewhere. I wouldn't know what to search
> for. What is the extension for an MP3 file? I think I must have sounds that are
> designed to signal events in KDE, but I don't know how to identify them because
> sound doesn't seem to work. Chicken and Egg...

If locate is set up, you can use

$ locate .wav
(or .mp3 for MP3 files)

if not, a very slow way to find some is:

$ find /usr -name '*.wav'

> For some reason which I do not understand, fuser shows nothing, and also
> lsof no longer shows artsd having /dev/dsp open. I think these two programs
> (fuser and lsof) display the same info in this case.
>
> I can bring up a realplayer instance when I try to listen to bbc news. The
> display on the screen behaves as if it is playing something that is 5m 10s
> long. The little thumb button moves slowly, etc. But there is no sound.

If you only plan on one program at a time using the sound, I think you can
just kill artsd altogether (at least I've never had a problem with doing
that).  I think you don't hear sound because whatever program you're using
is trying to use /dev/dsp, but artsd already controls that device.
That's why people gave you the artsdsp advice (which should work too, if
you're running the programs that need the sound on the command line).

Daniel

P.S. I'm making progress with Jack, which seems to be the best of the
sound daemons for Linux.  The Debian maintainer for jack seems very good,
which is refreshing.