[gentoo-user] Sound card is only usable by one application at a time

[gentoo-user] Sound card is only usable by one application at a time

[Yoav Luft]

Hi,
On my dell Vostro 1520, with intel hda ICH9 82801I sound card
(xSTAC92HD71B3, according to /proc/asound/card0/codec), only one
application can access the sound card at a time. This probably means
that applications access the hardware, and not some software mixer. I
tried to follow information in the alsa wiki
(http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/alsa-lib/pcm_plugins.html#pcm_plugins_dmix)
for setting manually dmix, but couldn't configure anything working. I
could find any good documentation (and I don't have plenty of time to
dig in it, it's the middle of the semester). Does anyone can help on
the topic?

[gentoo-user] Re: Sound card is only usable by one application at a time

[Nikos Chantziaras]

On 12/03/2009 11:23 PM, Yoav Luft wrote:
> Hi,
> On my dell Vostro 1520, with intel hda ICH9 82801I sound card
> (xSTAC92HD71B3, according to /proc/asound/card0/codec), only one
> application can access the sound card at a time. This probably means
> that applications access the hardware, and not some software mixer. I
> tried to follow information in the alsa wiki
> (http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/alsa-lib/pcm_plugins.html#pcm_plugins_dmix)
> for setting manually dmix, but couldn't configure anything working. I
> could find any good documentation (and I don't have plenty of time to
> dig in it, it's the middle of the semester). Does anyone can help on
> the topic?

I think all you need to do is to put the "alsasound" service in your 
default runlevel.

   rc-update add alsasound default

At least that's what I remember doing when I tried ALSA a few months 
ago.  You might need to reboot though so that the card is freed first.

[gentoo-user] Re: Sound card is only usable by one application at a time

[walt]

On 12/03/2009 01:23 PM, Yoav Luft wrote:
> Hi,
> On my dell Vostro 1520, with intel hda ICH9 82801I sound card
> (xSTAC92HD71B3, according to /proc/asound/card0/codec), only one
> application can access the sound card at a time...

I hope Nikos's suggestion will help you, but just in case it doesn't:

Most people don't have any need for more than one application to use
the sound card at the same time.  Do you have a special purpose in
mind, such as mixing multiple sound tracks, professional-quality
sound editing, film editing with special sound effects, or something
similar?

If you do, then you will be one of the very few people who actually
needs to use pulseaudio, because it will allow multiple applications
to use one sound card at the same time.  That is the purpose of
pulseaudio.  But, as I said, very few people really need it.

Can you explain more about what you are trying to do?

[gentoo-user] Re: Sound card is only usable by one application at a time

[Nikos Chantziaras]

On 12/04/2009 03:12 AM, walt wrote:
> Most people don't have any need for more than one application to use
> the sound card at the same time.

I was under the impression that it's quite the opposite.  For example I 
would still like to hear my MSN messenger go *ping* when someone talks 
to me while I'm listening to some mp3 and/or am playing a game.

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Sound card is only usable by one application at a time

[Dale]

Nikos Chantziaras wrote:
> On 12/04/2009 03:12 AM, walt wrote:
>> Most people don't have any need for more than one application to use
>> the sound card at the same time.
>
> I was under the impression that it's quite the opposite.  For example 
> I would still like to hear my MSN messenger go *ping* when someone 
> talks to me while I'm listening to some mp3 and/or am playing a game.
>

I ran into a similar problem a good while back where only one sound 
would play at a time, it was annoying as heck.  If I changed desktops, 
was playing a CD or even just left a tab open with some sound thingy 
playing, I couldn't hear anything else.  I couldn't hear Kopete if 
someone was trying to get me on messenger, couldn't hear the little bell 
when I got a new email or anything.

To say that a person only needs to hear one sound at a time is like 
telling someone to close one eye. 

Dale

:-)  :-) 

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Sound card is only usable by one application at a time

[Joshua Murphy]

On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 8:12 PM, walt <w41ter@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/03/2009 01:23 PM, Yoav Luft wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>> On my dell Vostro 1520, with intel hda ICH9 82801I sound card
>> (xSTAC92HD71B3, according to /proc/asound/card0/codec), only one
>> application can access the sound card at a time...
>
> I hope Nikos's suggestion will help you, but just in case it doesn't:
>
> Most people don't have any need for more than one application to use
> the sound card at the same time.  Do you have a special purpose in
> mind, such as mixing multiple sound tracks, professional-quality
> sound editing, film editing with special sound effects, or something
> similar?
>
> If you do, then you will be one of the very few people who actually
> needs to use pulseaudio, because it will allow multiple applications
> to use one sound card at the same time.  That is the purpose of
> pulseaudio.  But, as I said, very few people really need it.
>
> Can you explain more about what you are trying to do?

I'm not the OP, but it's been my experience that, when things aren't
configured to handle multiple processes using audio, you can't even
pause a movie in, say, mplayer to check out the youtube video a friend
just pointed you towards... which nowadays, is far from an uncommon
thing for a person to expect their computer to handle.

Lately, I've had zero issues with alsa pretty much configuring itself
properly, given I'm using the in kernel alsa drivers for my systems...
and it hasn't required any manual configuration of dmix or similar to
function properly. Last time I used a separate sound daemon (aside
from a short stent with Ubuntu on my netbook that, I think, had me
using pulseaudio), I was running esound to manage audio from a
headless box over my network... and ESD was playing nicely with other
straight alsa apps on the same box.

As a bit of a tip to the OP, since I'm going on about it all working,
while for them it isn't... 1) make sure you're using the alsa drivers
for your card and not oss (checking lspci -k) and 2) enable oss
emulation in the kernel (makes even OLD oss based software work
without much argument, in my experience).

-- 
Poison [BLX]
Joshua M. Murphy

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Sound card is only usable by one application at a time

[Yoav Luft]

My problem is exactly as others described: Usually, mpd is running and
playing my favorite tunes. Then, all of the sudden, I decide that I
would like watch some youtube movie, or something, so I stop mpd,
watch the movie, but when I want to play my music again mpd complains
that the audio device is busy. The only thing that works is to close
my browser AND all applications that were started from it (even if
they don't use the soundcard at all), which is an annoyance that I
didn't had to deal with when using different hardware or older version
of alsa. I've tried all the simple solutions I could find, like adding
alsasound rc, passing the model=dell-m4 to modprobe, and even messing
with asound.conf which only ended up in less usable soundcard. I've
noticed that applications access the /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p directly, and I
guess they should access some virtual device that will enable the
mixing or muxing of audio streams. I couldn't set such device, though.

On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 7:08 AM, Joshua Murphy <poisonbl@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 8:12 PM, walt <w41ter@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 12/03/2009 01:23 PM, Yoav Luft wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi,
>>> On my dell Vostro 1520, with intel hda ICH9 82801I sound card
>>> (xSTAC92HD71B3, according to /proc/asound/card0/codec), only one
>>> application can access the sound card at a time...
>>
>> I hope Nikos's suggestion will help you, but just in case it doesn't:
>>
>> Most people don't have any need for more than one application to use
>> the sound card at the same time.  Do you have a special purpose in
>> mind, such as mixing multiple sound tracks, professional-quality
>> sound editing, film editing with special sound effects, or something
>> similar?
>>
>> If you do, then you will be one of the very few people who actually
>> needs to use pulseaudio, because it will allow multiple applications
>> to use one sound card at the same time.  That is the purpose of
>> pulseaudio.  But, as I said, very few people really need it.
>>
>> Can you explain more about what you are trying to do?
>
> I'm not the OP, but it's been my experience that, when things aren't
> configured to handle multiple processes using audio, you can't even
> pause a movie in, say, mplayer to check out the youtube video a friend
> just pointed you towards... which nowadays, is far from an uncommon
> thing for a person to expect their computer to handle.
>
> Lately, I've had zero issues with alsa pretty much configuring itself
> properly, given I'm using the in kernel alsa drivers for my systems...
> and it hasn't required any manual configuration of dmix or similar to
> function properly. Last time I used a separate sound daemon (aside
> from a short stent with Ubuntu on my netbook that, I think, had me
> using pulseaudio), I was running esound to manage audio from a
> headless box over my network... and ESD was playing nicely with other
> straight alsa apps on the same box.
>
> As a bit of a tip to the OP, since I'm going on about it all working,
> while for them it isn't... 1) make sure you're using the alsa drivers
> for your card and not oss (checking lspci -k) and 2) enable oss
> emulation in the kernel (makes even OLD oss based software work
> without much argument, in my experience).
>
> --
> Poison [BLX]
> Joshua M. Murphy
>
>

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Sound card is only usable by one application at a time

[Nevynxxx]

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walt wrote:
> Most people don't have any need for more than one application to use
> the sound card at the same time.
As others have pointed out, that depends on your definition of need.

Most people don't worry about realtime mixing, but they still want
multiple sounds to be able to happen at once in a multi-tasking environment.





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[gentoo-user] Re: Sound card is only usable by one application at a time

[walt]

On 12/03/2009 09:08 PM, Joshua Murphy wrote:
...
> Lately, I've had zero issues with alsa pretty much configuring itself
> properly, given I'm using the in kernel alsa drivers for my systems...
> and it hasn't required any manual configuration of dmix or similar to
> function properly. Last time I used a separate sound daemon (aside
> from a short stent with Ubuntu on my netbook that, I think, had me
> using pulseaudio), I was running esound to manage audio from a
> headless box over my network... and ESD was playing nicely with other
> straight alsa apps on the same box...

I discovered a few weeks ago that I could completely delete all traces
of arts, pulse, *and* esd, and still I can listen to a podcast from
npr.org with firefox and play an mp3 using audacious at the same time.
(Which drives me totally nuts, BTW, and I did it only as a test.)

As you say, alsa seems to DTRT by itself these days.  The only thing
I'm not sure about is whether the gnome-panel volume/mixer applet is
now doing what esound used to do.

If you still have esound installed you can try it yourself.  Just
remove the arts, esd, and pulse USE flags first, then remove any/all
of those packages from the machine and revdep-rebuild.  It's amazing
how many packages are linked against esound and AFAICT they no longer
need to be.  (This applies to gnome, of course.)

OTOH, I haven't tested every sound-related app on my machine, so I
might be missing some important exceptions.

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Sound card is only usable by one application at a time

[App Des]

On Fri, 2009-12-04 at 00:36 +0200, Nikos Chantziaras wrote:
> On 12/03/2009 11:23 PM, Yoav Luft wrote:
> > Hi,
> > On my dell Vostro 1520, with intel hda ICH9 82801I sound card
> > (xSTAC92HD71B3, according to /proc/asound/card0/codec), only one
> > application can access the sound card at a time. This probably means
> > that applications access the hardware, and not some software mixer. I
> > tried to follow information in the alsa wiki
> > (http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/alsa-lib/pcm_plugins.html#pcm_plugins_dmix)
> > for setting manually dmix, but couldn't configure anything working. I
> > could find any good documentation (and I don't have plenty of time to
> > dig in it, it's the middle of the semester). Does anyone can help on
> > the topic?
> 
> I think all you need to do is to put the "alsasound" service in your 
> default runlevel.
> 
>    rc-update add alsasound default
> 
> At least that's what I remember doing when I tried ALSA a few months 
> ago.  You might need to reboot though so that the card is freed first.
> 
> 

I think it is best to add it to the "boot" runlevel intead of the
"default".

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Sound card is only usable by one application at a time

[daid kahl]

> I ran into a similar problem a good while back where only one sound would
> play at a time, it was annoying as heck.  If I changed desktops, was playing
> a CD or even just left a tab open with some sound thingy playing, I couldn't
> hear anything else.  I couldn't hear Kopete if someone was trying to get me
> on messenger, couldn't hear the little bell when I got a new email or
> anything.

Oddly, since I updated my kernel the last few weeks, youtube and
flash-like things are whiny.  At worst I have to restart firefox
and/or alsa.  I'm pretty sure it's a simple fix, but, it's slightly
irritating.

>
> To say that a person only needs to hear one sound at a time is like telling
> someone to close one eye.

Hey man, you're display's only 2D.  What do you need that second eye for anyway?

Regards,
daid

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Sound card is only usable by one application at a time

[Dale]

daid kahl wrote:
>> I ran into a similar problem a good while back where only one sound would
>> play at a time, it was annoying as heck.  If I changed desktops, was playing
>> a CD or even just left a tab open with some sound thingy playing, I couldn't
>> hear anything else.  I couldn't hear Kopete if someone was trying to get me
>> on messenger, couldn't hear the little bell when I got a new email or
>> anything.
>>     
>
> Oddly, since I updated my kernel the last few weeks, youtube and
> flash-like things are whiny.  At worst I have to restart firefox
> and/or alsa.  I'm pretty sure it's a simple fix, but, it's slightly
> irritating.
>   

I can't remember what I did to fix mine but that was the only time I can 
recall having sound trouble, other than having to unmute the sound the 
first time.  I'm using 2.6.30-gentoo-r6 right now and I have no sound 
issues.  I don't use modules tho.  Everything is built into my kernel 
except for the nvidia drivers. 

>   
>> To say that a person only needs to hear one sound at a time is like telling
>> someone to close one eye.
>>     
>
> Hey man, you're display's only 2D.  What do you need that second eye for anyway?
>
> Regards,
> daid
>
>   

I say that because I have a bad eye.  I wish I could see good with both 
because things sure do look different.  I can't just distance for 
example.  When the kids want to play baseball, I see the ball but it 
looks the same at a distance as it does just before it hits me in the 
forehead.  Well, it is a little bigger at that point.  O_o

Dale

:-)  :-) 

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Sound card is only usable by one application at a time

[Joshua Murphy]

On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 4:43 PM, walt <w41ter@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/03/2009 09:08 PM, Joshua Murphy wrote:
> ...
>>
>> Lately, I've had zero issues with alsa pretty much configuring itself
>> properly, given I'm using the in kernel alsa drivers for my systems...
>> and it hasn't required any manual configuration of dmix or similar to
>> function properly. Last time I used a separate sound daemon (aside
>> from a short stent with Ubuntu on my netbook that, I think, had me
>> using pulseaudio), I was running esound to manage audio from a
>> headless box over my network... and ESD was playing nicely with other
>> straight alsa apps on the same box...
>
> I discovered a few weeks ago that I could completely delete all traces
> of arts, pulse, *and* esd, and still I can listen to a podcast from
> npr.org with firefox and play an mp3 using audacious at the same time.
> (Which drives me totally nuts, BTW, and I did it only as a test.)
>
> As you say, alsa seems to DTRT by itself these days.  The only thing
> I'm not sure about is whether the gnome-panel volume/mixer applet is
> now doing what esound used to do.
>
> If you still have esound installed you can try it yourself.  Just
> remove the arts, esd, and pulse USE flags first, then remove any/all
> of those packages from the machine and revdep-rebuild.  It's amazing
> how many packages are linked against esound and AFAICT they no longer
> need to be.  (This applies to gnome, of course.)
>
> OTOH, I haven't tested every sound-related app on my machine, so I
> might be missing some important exceptions.

All Gnome's volume/mixer applet does, AFAIK, is the same as alsamixer,
on a less cli/ncurses interface... just volume control for the
channels the card tells the driver to tell the alsa subsystem it has
;) ... it doesn't have anything more, really, to do with the actual
'mixing' than that, and it works just as well without it, as evidenced
by my netbook with ratpoison, no arts, esd, pulseaudio, etc...
listening to a radio stream on one aterm that's running mplayer
(outputting to bare alsa) and getting prompt and proper alerts from
Skype at the same time.

'Course, all the anecdotal evidence in the world won't make the
problem the OP is seeing.

-- 
Poison [BLX]
Joshua M. Murphy

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Sound card is only usable by one application at a time

[daid kahl]

>>> To say that a person only needs to hear one sound at a time is like
>>> telling
>>> someone to close one eye.
>>>
>>
>> Hey man, you're display's only 2D.  What do you need that second eye for
>> anyway?
>>
>> Regards,
>> daid
>>
>>
>
> I say that because I have a bad eye.  I wish I could see good with both
> because things sure do look different.  I can't just distance for example.
>  When the kids want to play baseball, I see the ball but it looks the same
> at a distance as it does just before it hits me in the forehead.  Well, it
> is a little bigger at that point.  O_o

Yeah, but that's a 3D effect!

~daid

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Sound card is only usable by one application at a time

[Yoav Luft]

hmmm. I've managed to focus the problem: Some programs try to access
to sound device called "hw:0,0" and there for do not allow it to be
shared. MPD was one of them, and when I changed the setting in
mpd.conf to using "default" it works. The flash player, though, still
tries to access the hardware directly. I'm not sure how to reconfigure
it. I'm using the adobe player.
Can anyone think of away of making all programs use "default" sound
output rather than "hw:0,0"?
Should I report that as a bug to the mpd package maintainer, that the
default setting try to access the sound device directly?

On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 6:12 AM, Joshua Murphy <poisonbl@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 4:43 PM, walt <w41ter@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 12/03/2009 09:08 PM, Joshua Murphy wrote:
>> ...
>>>
>>> Lately, I've had zero issues with alsa pretty much configuring itself
>>> properly, given I'm using the in kernel alsa drivers for my systems...
>>> and it hasn't required any manual configuration of dmix or similar to
>>> function properly. Last time I used a separate sound daemon (aside
>>> from a short stent with Ubuntu on my netbook that, I think, had me
>>> using pulseaudio), I was running esound to manage audio from a
>>> headless box over my network... and ESD was playing nicely with other
>>> straight alsa apps on the same box...
>>
>> I discovered a few weeks ago that I could completely delete all traces
>> of arts, pulse, *and* esd, and still I can listen to a podcast from
>> npr.org with firefox and play an mp3 using audacious at the same time.
>> (Which drives me totally nuts, BTW, and I did it only as a test.)
>>
>> As you say, alsa seems to DTRT by itself these days.  The only thing
>> I'm not sure about is whether the gnome-panel volume/mixer applet is
>> now doing what esound used to do.
>>
>> If you still have esound installed you can try it yourself.  Just
>> remove the arts, esd, and pulse USE flags first, then remove any/all
>> of those packages from the machine and revdep-rebuild.  It's amazing
>> how many packages are linked against esound and AFAICT they no longer
>> need to be.  (This applies to gnome, of course.)
>>
>> OTOH, I haven't tested every sound-related app on my machine, so I
>> might be missing some important exceptions.
>
> All Gnome's volume/mixer applet does, AFAIK, is the same as alsamixer,
> on a less cli/ncurses interface... just volume control for the
> channels the card tells the driver to tell the alsa subsystem it has
> ;) ... it doesn't have anything more, really, to do with the actual
> 'mixing' than that, and it works just as well without it, as evidenced
> by my netbook with ratpoison, no arts, esd, pulseaudio, etc...
> listening to a radio stream on one aterm that's running mplayer
> (outputting to bare alsa) and getting prompt and proper alerts from
> Skype at the same time.
>
> 'Course, all the anecdotal evidence in the world won't make the
> problem the OP is seeing.
>
> --
> Poison [BLX]
> Joshua M. Murphy
>
>

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Sound card is only usable by one application at a time

[Jesús Guerrero]

On Fri, 04 Dec 2009 00:36:36 +0200, Nikos Chantziaras <realnc@arcor.de>
wrote:
> On 12/03/2009 11:23 PM, Yoav Luft wrote:
>> Hi,
>> On my dell Vostro 1520, with intel hda ICH9 82801I sound card
>> (xSTAC92HD71B3, according to /proc/asound/card0/codec), only one
>> application can access the sound card at a time. This probably means
>> that applications access the hardware, and not some software mixer. I
>> tried to follow information in the alsa wiki
>>
(http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/alsa-lib/pcm_plugins.html#pcm_plugins_dmix)
>> for setting manually dmix, but couldn't configure anything working. I
>> could find any good documentation (and I don't have plenty of time to
>> dig in it, it's the middle of the semester). Does anyone can help on
>> the topic?
> 
> I think all you need to do is to put the "alsasound" service in your 
> default runlevel.
> 
>    rc-update add alsasound default
> 
> At least that's what I remember doing when I tried ALSA a few months 
> ago.  You might need to reboot though so that the card is freed first.

All alsasound does is to save and restore mixer settings, so you don't
have to modify them by hand each time you reboot. 

There are a number of problems with dmix in alsa, it's one of the reasons
why people keep inventing stuff like pulseaudio to work around these
issues, when they should be fixing the problem itself, which is in alsa. I
for one, use the ca0106 driver for an audigy card. dmix here works ok...
until you play a 5.1 stream. When the surround is enabled then dmix doesn't
work, and I can't play anything else. When I am in regular stereo mode I
can play as many streams as I want without a problem.

This is well known, reported, and it has hit a lot of people. But
unfortunately, there's no fix yet.

@Yoav Luft, I don't know if this is the same problem, maybe it doesn't
relate at all. You should start by checking that there's no pulseaudio or
something like that monopolizing the alsa output, because maybe the problem
is not alsa itself. But, if alsa is running alone, I'd start by checking
the alsa bug tracker and see if there's someone that has the same card/uses
the same driver and has the same problem.

-- 
Jesús Guerrero

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Sound card is only usable by one application at a time

[Jesús Guerrero]

On Fri, 04 Dec 2009 04:44:50 +0200, Nikos Chantziaras <realnc@arcor.de>
wrote:
> On 12/04/2009 03:12 AM, walt wrote:
>> Most people don't have any need for more than one application to use
>> the sound card at the same time.
> 
> I was under the impression that it's quite the opposite.  For example I 
> would still like to hear my MSN messenger go *ping* when someone talks 
> to me while I'm listening to some mp3 and/or am playing a game.

Definitely, *most* do need support for software mixing. I am not on the
boat of notifications or system sounds, but most users are, and all the
major desktops do enable sound notifications by default, and all the major
IM programs do as well. 

I like austerity so I don't use these little things, but even for me this
is a must. I might have many sound tracks playing at a given moment while I
practice with my guitar. Heck, even for youtube this is a must, because the
plugin likes to trap the sound card, and you can't even listen to another
video if you have another tab with youtube on it, even if the video in that
tab is not playing nor even paused.

So, yes. Definitely, 99% of the users need software mixing.

However, it is not true that you need pulse for that. That's what the dmix
alsa plugin is for. The problem is not that alsa can't do it. The problem
is that alsa is buggy as hell and should really be fixed. Or, it should be
simplified to provide only the basic functionality, rip out all the crap
and do it in user land, with either pulse, jack or whatever. The problem is
that there are many layers like alsa and pulse that don't have a clear
delimitation, they overlap functionality, duplicate code and bloat the
system making it prone to bugs and stuff like this. The sound system in
linux is in a pitiful state right now :P
-- 
Jesús Guerrero

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Sound card is only usable by one application at a time

[Jesús Guerrero]

On Fri, 04 Dec 2009 23:47:18 +0200, App Des <app4des@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 2009-12-04 at 00:36 +0200, Nikos Chantziaras wrote:
>> On 12/03/2009 11:23 PM, Yoav Luft wrote:
>> > Hi,
>> > On my dell Vostro 1520, with intel hda ICH9 82801I sound card
>> > (xSTAC92HD71B3, according to /proc/asound/card0/codec), only one
>> > application can access the sound card at a time. This probably means
>> > that applications access the hardware, and not some software mixer. I
>> > tried to follow information in the alsa wiki
>> >
(http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/alsa-lib/pcm_plugins.html#pcm_plugins_dmix)
>> > for setting manually dmix, but couldn't configure anything working. I
>> > could find any good documentation (and I don't have plenty of time to
>> > dig in it, it's the middle of the semester). Does anyone can help on
>> > the topic?
>> 
>> I think all you need to do is to put the "alsasound" service in your 
>> default runlevel.
>> 
>>    rc-update add alsasound default
>> 
>> At least that's what I remember doing when I tried ALSA a few months 
>> ago.  You might need to reboot though so that the card is freed first.
>> 
>> 
> 
> I think it is best to add it to the "boot" runlevel intead of the
> "default".

It really doesn't make any difference, unless you have one init script in
the boot level that plays an mp3 file or something ;)

As said on my other mail in this thread, all alsasound does is to set up
the mixer settings (volumes and such), so, as long as it's started before
you want to hear a sound then it's fine. It doesn't really need to be on
the boot level, default is fine. But, in any case, this doesn't effect the
capability to do soft mixing at all. The problem is elsewhere.
-- 
Jesús Guerrero

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Sound card is only usable by one application at a time

[Jesús Guerrero]

On Sat, 5 Dec 2009 17:51:35 +0200, Yoav Luft <yoav.luft@gmail.com> wrote:
> hmmm. I've managed to focus the problem: Some programs try to access
> to sound device called "hw:0,0" and there for do not allow it to be
> shared. MPD was one of them, and when I changed the setting in
> mpd.conf to using "default" it works. The flash player, though, still
> tries to access the hardware directly. I'm not sure how to reconfigure
> it. I'm using the adobe player.
> Can anyone think of away of making all programs use "default" sound
> output rather than "hw:0,0"?
> Should I report that as a bug to the mpd package maintainer, that the
> default setting try to access the sound device directly?

Couple of questions: did you try removing whatever customizations you have
done in ~/.asoundrc? If so, try to move that file elsewhere and see.

Do you have more than one sound chip? If you have an embedded sound chip
in your motherboard that you are not using for anything try disabling it in
your BIOS setup.

-- 
Jesús Guerrero

[gentoo-user] Re: Sound card is only usable by one application at a time

[Nikos Chantziaras]

You didn't mention whether you tried running the alsasound service in 
order to get dmix.  If enabled, it doesn't matter what sound device the 
apps want to open.

On 12/05/2009 05:51 PM, Yoav Luft wrote:
> hmmm. I've managed to focus the problem: Some programs try to access
> to sound device called "hw:0,0" and there for do not allow it to be
> shared. MPD was one of them, and when I changed the setting in
> mpd.conf to using "default" it works. The flash player, though, still
> tries to access the hardware directly. I'm not sure how to reconfigure
> it. I'm using the adobe player.
> Can anyone think of away of making all programs use "default" sound
> output rather than "hw:0,0"?
> Should I report that as a bug to the mpd package maintainer, that the
> default setting try to access the sound device directly?
>
> On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 6:12 AM, Joshua Murphy<poisonbl@gmail.com>  wrote:
>> On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 4:43 PM, walt<w41ter@gmail.com>  wrote:
>>> On 12/03/2009 09:08 PM, Joshua Murphy wrote:
>>> ...
>>>>
>>>> Lately, I've had zero issues with alsa pretty much configuring itself
>>>> properly, given I'm using the in kernel alsa drivers for my systems...
>>>> and it hasn't required any manual configuration of dmix or similar to
>>>> function properly. Last time I used a separate sound daemon (aside
>>>> from a short stent with Ubuntu on my netbook that, I think, had me
>>>> using pulseaudio), I was running esound to manage audio from a
>>>> headless box over my network... and ESD was playing nicely with other
>>>> straight alsa apps on the same box...
>>>
>>> I discovered a few weeks ago that I could completely delete all traces
>>> of arts, pulse, *and* esd, and still I can listen to a podcast from
>>> npr.org with firefox and play an mp3 using audacious at the same time.
>>> (Which drives me totally nuts, BTW, and I did it only as a test.)
>>>
>>> As you say, alsa seems to DTRT by itself these days.  The only thing
>>> I'm not sure about is whether the gnome-panel volume/mixer applet is
>>> now doing what esound used to do.
>>>
>>> If you still have esound installed you can try it yourself.  Just
>>> remove the arts, esd, and pulse USE flags first, then remove any/all
>>> of those packages from the machine and revdep-rebuild.  It's amazing
>>> how many packages are linked against esound and AFAICT they no longer
>>> need to be.  (This applies to gnome, of course.)
>>>
>>> OTOH, I haven't tested every sound-related app on my machine, so I
>>> might be missing some important exceptions.
>>
>> All Gnome's volume/mixer applet does, AFAIK, is the same as alsamixer,
>> on a less cli/ncurses interface... just volume control for the
>> channels the card tells the driver to tell the alsa subsystem it has
>> ;) ... it doesn't have anything more, really, to do with the actual
>> 'mixing' than that, and it works just as well without it, as evidenced
>> by my netbook with ratpoison, no arts, esd, pulseaudio, etc...
>> listening to a radio stream on one aterm that's running mplayer
>> (outputting to bare alsa) and getting prompt and proper alerts from
>> Skype at the same time.
>>
>> 'Course, all the anecdotal evidence in the world won't make the
>> problem the OP is seeing.
>>
>> --
>> Poison [BLX]
>> Joshua M. Murphy
>>
>>
>
>

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Sound card is only usable by one application at a time

[Yoav Luft]

alsasound is on boot runlevel, so it's running. Still, some apps, like
flash movies in firefox, don't behave nicely.

On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 7:15 PM, Nikos Chantziaras <realnc@arcor.de> wrote:
> You didn't mention whether you tried running the alsasound service in order
> to get dmix.  If enabled, it doesn't matter what sound device the apps want
> to open.
>
> On 12/05/2009 05:51 PM, Yoav Luft wrote:
>>
>> hmmm. I've managed to focus the problem: Some programs try to access
>> to sound device called "hw:0,0" and there for do not allow it to be
>> shared. MPD was one of them, and when I changed the setting in
>> mpd.conf to using "default" it works. The flash player, though, still
>> tries to access the hardware directly. I'm not sure how to reconfigure
>> it. I'm using the adobe player.
>> Can anyone think of away of making all programs use "default" sound
>> output rather than "hw:0,0"?
>> Should I report that as a bug to the mpd package maintainer, that the
>> default setting try to access the sound device directly?
>>
>> On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 6:12 AM, Joshua Murphy<poisonbl@gmail.com>  wrote:
>>>
>>> On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 4:43 PM, walt<w41ter@gmail.com>  wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On 12/03/2009 09:08 PM, Joshua Murphy wrote:
>>>> ...
>>>>>
>>>>> Lately, I've had zero issues with alsa pretty much configuring itself
>>>>> properly, given I'm using the in kernel alsa drivers for my systems...
>>>>> and it hasn't required any manual configuration of dmix or similar to
>>>>> function properly. Last time I used a separate sound daemon (aside
>>>>> from a short stent with Ubuntu on my netbook that, I think, had me
>>>>> using pulseaudio), I was running esound to manage audio from a
>>>>> headless box over my network... and ESD was playing nicely with other
>>>>> straight alsa apps on the same box...
>>>>
>>>> I discovered a few weeks ago that I could completely delete all traces
>>>> of arts, pulse, *and* esd, and still I can listen to a podcast from
>>>> npr.org with firefox and play an mp3 using audacious at the same time.
>>>> (Which drives me totally nuts, BTW, and I did it only as a test.)
>>>>
>>>> As you say, alsa seems to DTRT by itself these days.  The only thing
>>>> I'm not sure about is whether the gnome-panel volume/mixer applet is
>>>> now doing what esound used to do.
>>>>
>>>> If you still have esound installed you can try it yourself.  Just
>>>> remove the arts, esd, and pulse USE flags first, then remove any/all
>>>> of those packages from the machine and revdep-rebuild.  It's amazing
>>>> how many packages are linked against esound and AFAICT they no longer
>>>> need to be.  (This applies to gnome, of course.)
>>>>
>>>> OTOH, I haven't tested every sound-related app on my machine, so I
>>>> might be missing some important exceptions.
>>>
>>> All Gnome's volume/mixer applet does, AFAIK, is the same as alsamixer,
>>> on a less cli/ncurses interface... just volume control for the
>>> channels the card tells the driver to tell the alsa subsystem it has
>>> ;) ... it doesn't have anything more, really, to do with the actual
>>> 'mixing' than that, and it works just as well without it, as evidenced
>>> by my netbook with ratpoison, no arts, esd, pulseaudio, etc...
>>> listening to a radio stream on one aterm that's running mplayer
>>> (outputting to bare alsa) and getting prompt and proper alerts from
>>> Skype at the same time.
>>>
>>> 'Course, all the anecdotal evidence in the world won't make the
>>> problem the OP is seeing.
>>>
>>> --
>>> Poison [BLX]
>>> Joshua M. Murphy
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
>

[gentoo-user] Re: Sound card is only usable by one application at a time

[walt]

On 12/05/2009 01:36 PM, Yoav Luft wrote:
> alsasound is on boot runlevel, so it's running. Still, some apps, like
> flash movies in firefox, don't behave nicely.

Can you give us a URL for a flash movie so I can test?

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Sound card is only usable by one application at a time

[daid kahl]

> @Yoav Luft, I don't know if this is the same problem, maybe it doesn't
> relate at all. You should start by checking that there's no pulseaudio or
> something like that monopolizing the alsa output, because maybe the problem
> is not alsa itself. But, if alsa is running alone, I'd start by checking
> the alsa bug tracker and see if there's someone that has the same card/uses
> the same driver and has the same problem.

Just a suggestion on how to test easily.  Boot into console-login and
run mplayer in one ty and mpg321 in another.

I'm sure there are a million variants on ways to do this, but I assume
most have mplayer installed, and mpg321 is small enough for a quick
install, and it uses different libraries I believe, so it should
access separately.

Apparently I can't even follow my own advice, because mplayer is
disallowing mpg321 to access my soundcard!  Well, I guess that
explains my youtube issues!  Of course mpg321 isn't allowed access if
youtube is playing either.

I guess I should fix my own system....

Regards,
daid

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Sound card is only usable by one application at a time

[daid kahl]

>>
>> alsasound is on boot runlevel, so it's running. Still, some apps, like
>> flash movies in firefox, don't behave nicely.
>
> Can you give us a URL for a flash movie so I can test?
>

Since I'm having trouble too, here is a youtube video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoAbMfg9_Uk

Maybe you'll like the track.

:P

~daid

[gentoo-user] Re: Sound card is only usable by one application at a time

[Nikos Chantziaras]

You *might* want to look into OSS4 if your card is supported by it :P 
It will require a rebuild of many packages though ("oss -alsa" in 
make.conf) and it requires using non-portage packages from an overlay 
and rebuilding your kernel with sound support completely disabled.

For what it's worth, that's what I use for a quite some time now.

On 12/05/2009 11:36 PM, Yoav Luft wrote:
> alsasound is on boot runlevel, so it's running. Still, some apps, like
> flash movies in firefox, don't behave nicely.
>
> On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 7:15 PM, Nikos Chantziaras<realnc@arcor.de>  wrote:
>> You didn't mention whether you tried running the alsasound service in order
>> to get dmix.  If enabled, it doesn't matter what sound device the apps want
>> to open.

[gentoo-user] Re: Sound card is only usable by one application at a time

[7v5w7go9ub0o]

Nikos Chantziaras wrote:
> You *might* want to look into OSS4 if your card is supported by it :P
> It will require a rebuild of many packages though ("oss -alsa" in 
> make.conf) and it requires using non-portage packages from an overlay
>  and rebuilding your kernel with sound support completely disabled.
> 
> For what it's worth, that's what I use for a quite some time now.

Do you see any advantage(s) to using OSS4 over alsa?

e.g.

1. less distortion and/or better quality?
2. more control over the sound (e.g. equalizers)?
3. others?

What about downsides?

(I am presently using alsa, and intermittently have blocked sounds -
guess it is due to how the app was written.)

TIA

[gentoo-user] Re: Sound card is only usable by one application at a time

[Nikos Chantziaras]

On 12/07/2009 03:24 PM, 7v5w7go9ub0o wrote:
> Nikos Chantziaras wrote:
>> You *might* want to look into OSS4 if your card is supported by it :P
>> It will require a rebuild of many packages though ("oss -alsa" in
>> make.conf) and it requires using non-portage packages from an overlay
>>   and rebuilding your kernel with sound support completely disabled.
>>
>> For what it's worth, that's what I use for a quite some time now.
>
> Do you see any advantage(s) to using OSS4 over alsa?
>
> e.g.
>
> 1. less distortion and/or better quality?

My equipment is not good enough for me to notice OSS4's better mixing 
quality (I have 50$ speakers :P).

> 2. more control over the sound (e.g. equalizers)?

It does not have equalizers.  It does however provide per-application 
volume levels.  That is, the mixer application allows me to lower the 
volume of "Amarok" for example while leaving all other apps alone. 
Every mixed application by vmix (OSS4's "dmix") gets its own volume control.


> 3. others?

The most important for me is that it always does mixing and is fully 
compatible with OSS (duh!).

The second most important is audio latency.  ALSA on my system is too 
slow (I can notice a delay between firing a shot and hearing the *bang* 
in Doom 3 for example, or hitting a key and hearing a note in LMMS.)

A third is that OSS4 can be used together with ALSA's userspace lib, so 
ALSA-only apps can be compatible with OSS4.  But not all ALSA apps work 
with this setup (one I found that doesn't is Firefox, see below).


> What about downsides?

A downside for me is that the HTML5 video/audio support in Firefox needs 
ALSA; trying to watch an HTML5 Ogg Theora video with alsa-lib using OSS4 
results in a 5FPS video playback even though there's no CPU utilization.

(Note that Flash videos have no issues.)

Another downside is that mixer applications (for example those of Gnome 
and KDE) do not support even a single feature of OSS4, so those mixers 
tend to show a pretty spartan amount of controls.

Yet another downside is that installing it can be a pain, especially if 
you have "-oss" in your make.conf; a big package rebuild is in order then.


> (I am presently using alsa, and intermittently have blocked sounds -
> guess it is due to how the app was written.)

This was the reason I used OSS4 a while back when it got open sourced. 
I was lucky my card (SB Live 24-bit) was supported by it; OSS4's 
hardware support list is shorter than ALSA's.