[lug] Linux sound or lack thereof

[Paul E Condon]

On Thu, Sep 09, 2004 at 10:09:31AM -0400, Michael D. Hirsch wrote:
> 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

I am in a similar position to OP vis-a-vis sound. I have an i386 box running
Debian Sarge. I know that my sound hardware works, because I can hear the
sound chords when KDE starts. 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. 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) 


-- 
Paul E Condon           
pecondon at mesanetworks.net