[lug] Linux sound or lack thereof

[Michael D. Hirsch]

On Thursday 09 September 2004 12:59 am, Daniel Webb wrote:
> I've spent way too many hours trying to find any linux sound frameworks
> that aren't total shit.  Here's what I've tried so far:
>
> esound - doesn't seem to work at all

Really braindamaged program in many ways.  But so simple that it should work.

> arts - artsbuilder crashes when trying to execute anything at all

Much better than esound technically, but more complex in my experience.

> jack - won't start (filed Debian bug report)
> jack compiled from sources - seems to start fine, but client can't connect

Don't know about those.

Are you using alsa or OSS sound drivers?  You need to make sure that whatever 
you are using knows how to deal with your drivers.  I think arts works better 
with alsa, esound with OSS, but that may well be wrong.  But if you configure 
them backwards there will probably be trouble.

> All I want to do is capture whatever is coming out of XMMS and send it to
> icecast.  Either I'm just totally overlooking something, or there are some
> real deficiences here.  As you may have guessed, this has become really
> frustrating.  There are xmms output plugins for arts and jack, so this
> really shouldn't be so hard.

I thought that alsa had the ability to snoop.  I believe it has a device you 
can listen to and get all the bits that it is playing.  If my memory is 
right, you don't need esound/artsd/jack at all.  You just play from xmms (or 
anything) with alsa output, then have another process read from alsa all the 
input and forward to icecast.

If you don't care about listening to the output in the first place, only about 
forwarding, you should be able to use the output to a file option.  Make the 
file a named pipe, and have a process read from the pipe and send to icecast.

Michael