daniel wrote: >I just installed Amarok (I don't use arts) and it kept failing with this >error: > > [GStreamer Error] ALSA device "default" is already in use by another program > > I'm a heavy amarok user, and just recently spent many, many, many hours playing with alsa, arts, jackd, esd, gstreamer, etc, etc to get my system sound setup and working correctly. The main thing for me was I wanted to be able to have other applications generate sound at the same time as amarok was playing music, with decent sound quality, etc.
My final configuration was using the xine engine in amarok (which sounds great to me, BTW), using the ALSA dmix plugin for the 'default' device, and arts for KDE and VMWare audio. I really do *not* recommend GStreamer at this time...it was too unstable for me. It will consume 100% of the CPU cycles when the music is paused (playing is fine...), and will interact badly with dmix if you decide to go that route. Now to answer your question, the /dev/dsp devices are only used for the 'OSS' audio API. A native ALSA application will not use this API, it will use alsalib and an internal alsa device called (normally) "hw:0,0". When you played music with mplayer, it used the "[alsa]" driver. So you know that the alsa drivers are installed and functional. IF you need to run an application that only knows OSS (/dev/dsp), you will need to modprobe 'snd_pcm_oss'. If you don't have that built, reconfigure your kernel with CONFIG_SND_OSSEMUL and CONFIG_SND_PCM_OSS. However, neither the GStreamer engine nor xine should require this OSS API or device node...they should be able to use the same ALSA device as mplayer. So, if you have a ~/.asoundrc file, try renaming that to ~/.asoundrc.sav, and try again. This file can be used to setup the "default" device that GStreamer was complaining about, and maybe you have a problem in that. As a last resort, if you configure the GStreamer engine, you can specify a device to use with alsasink. Try entering "hw:0,0" there, and see what happens. -Richard -- [email protected] mailing list
