[lug] Linux sound or lack thereof

[Michael D. Hirsch]

On Thursday 09 September 2004 07:09 pm, Paul E Condon wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 09, 2004 at 04:35:08PM -0400, Michael D. Hirsch wrote:
> > On Thursday 09 September 2004 12:57 pm, Paul E Condon wrote:

> > > But I can't get any other form of
> > > sound to work. I would like to be able to listen to sound clips from
> > > nytimes and bbc. I have installed realplayer. realplayer brings up its
> > > 'skin' on screen, but there is never any actual sound. I have a
> > > feeling, like OP, that there is something that I am not doing that is
> > > just so obvious to the cogniscenti that they never mention it,
> > > something like the meanings of those silly icons on the players for
> > > start, stop, rewind, etc., but something else.
> >
> > 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...

'locate .wav .mp3 .ogg' should do it.

Alternatively, in KDE Control Center, go to the System Notification page (for 
me that is Sound & Multimedia -> System Notifications.  Select one of the 
events, then in the Actions box check the "Play a sound" box.  click the 
floder to the right of the window and you will be given a bunch of sound 
files to pick from.  Select one, click OK, then clikc the little play 
triangle next to the filename.  On my system I have .wav and .ogg files 
provided by KDE in /usr/share/sounds.

> > displayed in konqueror with sound files in it, what happens if you click
> > on the sound file.  Can you play wavs that way?  What about mp3s?
>
> Where can I find mp3s to try? What to I do to try?
>
> > > There are indications that some process has grabbed the
> > > sound hardware and won't let others use it. But what process? And how
> > > to I find it and coax it to play fair? (the indications come from
> > > cryptic messages from inside the kde configurator which I can't
> > > reproduce from memory)
> >
> > fuser is your friend.  as root, run fuser /dev/dsp and see what happens.
>
> 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.

Yes, and it sounds as if your problem is not that the sound device is being 
monopolized.  Since you say you hear sound at KDE startup, it also doesn't 
sound like your mixer settings are wrong, but it is worth exploring.  I 
usually don't have problems with my mixer for output, only for input, but you 
might bring up kmix, or xmixer, or aumix and turn everything up and unmute 
all.