All I want for x-mas is :: no more sound card is in use errors!

Jamon Camisso jamon.camisso-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org
Tue Dec 25 01:19:27 UTC 2007


On December 24, 2007 20:09:38 ted leslie wrote:
> It am almost getting to the point where I can't find any issue with
> new shiny Gutsy install. It dual monitors great with Nvidia card,
> plays just about any multimedia I throw at it (well except a bluray i
> tried, sound got out of sync pretty bad), etc,etc.
>
> One problem I have, and have had in the past with other distro's is
> that some process will be using the sound card in a way that other
> processes get blocked.
> I know at times in the past I was able to have flash (in browser)
> share with amarok, etc, but there is always some combination that
> doesn't work.
> In Gutsy, I have had no better luck.
>
> Does anyone  have a linux configured that
> can have a flash plugin, music player, real player, and especially
> vmware (and the virtual OS in the vmware using sound) all co-existing
> happily? All technically playing at once, as bad as it might sound.
> Or is this not possible?
> The exact case in point is, the firefox flash plugin seems to grab
> and keep the sound card, even when nothing is playing, i'd like to
> listen to a podcast on amarok, listen to the odd wmv voice file in my
> email (company does VM this way) and then get sound from another
> linux (or rarely a windows image) in vmware -
> doing all this, without having to selectively shutdown certain apps.
> Keep in mind that N number of things might "have" the sound card,
> but only one is actually producing audio at a time (or perhaps a
> slight over lap, i.e. listening to podcast, and hearing a v-mail) the
> rest might be in a 0-volume or pause state, etc. and I just don't
> want to have to shut stuff off just so one thing can get its turn to
> produce sound.
>
> I am hoping there is some sound/audio driver that can do this.
>
> Here's hoping someone delivers this x-mas wish to me!
>
> I don't recall getting this in MS windows, but it been so long I am
> not sure, and as of 1-2 years ago, don't recall getting this on my
> MacOSX either, but maybe I never tried to much multiplexing, and I
> certainly never had the VMWARE part in the mix on these.
>
> Right now I am just using stock ubuntu gutsy's default sound drivers
> (and setup). For sure I know that mplayer and vmware don't play nice
> together, and flash plugin and vmware (and amarok) don't play nice
> together, plus I am sure there are many  more combinations.
>
> I hear all this talk about this new sound driver (server?) in the new
> Fedora, and its in Ubuntu Heron (beta), and I am wondering perhaps if
> that address this issue?
>
> Merry x-mas and a Happy New Year to all!

Pulseaudio is causing no small amount of trouble on any Fedora machine 
I've used so far. There is a regression in Fedora 8 where Intel ICH7 
chips (the snd-hda-intel kernel module) completely breaks and nothing 
puts out any sound. No fix as of yet.

I tend to roll my own kernels, which isn't so bad once you have a good 
baseline .config for your particular hardware setup. I always ensure 
that the OSS portion of the sound section is entirely excluded, not 
built as a module or statically--nothing.

I haven't run into problems like those you describe since making sure I 
don't compile OSS (it's deprecated anyways) and I have Vmware, Flash, 
Amarok, Kaffeine all going at the same time without any problems.

Do you have enough ram on the system? Have you tried installing one of 
the realtime kernel's from Ubuntu?

Jamon
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