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
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sorry for jump in in the middle. I was trying to do what you've done, setting up alsa dmix. I followed that howto at gentoo-wiki, now mplayer and beep-media-player seems working fine, but xine is not, I don't know what's wrong with it, I chose the alsa output plugin and leave everything else as default, but I still can't have other sounds when xine is playing. in mplayer and bmp I use "dmixer" as the output plugin, I tried to do the same to xine, however it just made things worse, an error complaining about output device wrong came up. what can I do?
thanx
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