Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Sound card is only usable by one application at a time
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
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 poiso...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 4:43 PM, walt w41...@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
On Fri, 04 Dec 2009 00:36:36 +0200, Nikos Chantziaras rea...@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
On Fri, 04 Dec 2009 04:44:50 +0200, Nikos Chantziaras rea...@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
On Fri, 04 Dec 2009 23:47:18 +0200, App Des app4...@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
On Sat, 5 Dec 2009 17:51:35 +0200, Yoav Luft yoav.l...@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
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Sound card is only usable by one application at a time
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 rea...@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 Murphypoiso...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 4:43 PM, waltw41...@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, 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
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
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Sound card is only usable by one application at a time
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 poiso...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 8:12 PM, walt w41...@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
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. signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Sound card is only usable by one application at a time
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
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
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
On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 4:43 PM, walt w41...@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
On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 8:12 PM, walt w41...@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
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 :-) :-)
