> Oh, well... I can play mp3s here. What are you using to play them? In > xmms, try chosing the OSS driver instead of esound. > > The only thing that's not working here is esound. > BTW, I'm running woody.
GNOME plays sounds through esd. If esd is not running, and sound is enabled in GNOME, and an app issues a sound, then GNOME pauses or hangs up. So one wants esd to be running. I had a problem getting esd running. After a day of tinkering I discovered that the problem was that my loopback device was not configured. The solution was to do "ifconfig lo 127.0.0.1". esd accesses the sound hardware through the special device files. (I guess the exact file depends upon whether you are using the "esound" or the "esound-alsa" package.) I found that when I ran xmms with the OSS or ALSA output plugin, so that it was accessing the sound hardware directly through these files, esd and in turn GNOME would be blocked. But when I selected the esound output plug for xmms the problem went away. The purpose of esd, after all, is to allow multiple processes to access the sound hardware simultaneously without blocking one another. Thomas Hood