Hey all

I have recently ditched windows completely from my main system, and although i have nearly given up a few times it seems that if i persist enough I can get things happening!

My main issue at the moment is sound, I am running Debian "etch" (which i believe is the "testing" branch?, sorry haven't been keeping up with debian for a while as i've been trying to run ubuntu/kubuntu and suse... turns out i wasn't happy with any of them...)... i also have the unstable repo's enabled in my .list... so my system is a bit of a mixture i guess you could say...

Anyways... i have been messing around with trying to get sound working in certain apps... desktop sounds seem to be fine... amarok and mplayer quite happily play everything i throw at it... but firefox refused to play sounds in flash... fixed that by editing the firefoxrc file and telling it to use "aoss" or "artsdsp" (can't remember which one i used... didn't matter anyway as it was set to "none")... so that fixed that problem... then I noticed i was having trouble getting sound in a couple of games... oh i should mention i'm using kde and not gnome... haven't tested anything in gnome, i should i guess... but i want to use kde so that is where i have been targeting my trouble shooting... the games i have mainly noticed problems with are "Chromium, Pingus, Gridwars 2 and Marble Blast Gold Trial Version"... these are the only ones i've tested... chromium ran fine... no sound.... pingus ran fine... no sound... gridwars 2 ran fine... no sound.... marble blast gold trial refused to run at all...

I went into the KDE control panel and changed the sound system from autodetect to ALSA... bingo it fixed them all... but now my system sounds are gone (minimizing and opening windows n stuff... not a huge deal but it was working!)... i then tried changing to OSS and other options on the list... lost sound completely at one stage... set back to ALSA as it seemed to work well (except for not being able to play sound in more then one program at a time) but then i try gridwars again... no sound... tried oss... no sound... ended up giving up n goin to bed as it was quite late at this stage... lol...

anyways, i need to know if anyone has experienced this kind of thing before?

also what is the best engine to use in amarok for playback? my ideal setup would be so i can run amarok with mp3s playing... and run say gridwars or chromium or whatever and be able to hear the sounds the game has to offer (not music obviously)... is this at all possible?

i am using the onboard sound of my ASRock 939DUAL-SATA2 motherboard... which for the most part works great with all 4.1 channels i have sounding fantastic...

please help!

Well, a default Etch install comes indeed without alsa (unless this changed).

All I had to do was pretty simple (I don't use KDE).
I first installed alsa-tools and alsa-oss with apt.
Next alsaconf configured nicely.

As you noticed, many apps aren't configured yet for alsa(xmms, mplayer, ...).
Changing this in the app(change the output to alsa) itself fixed all that.

Some software isn't yet alsa compatible (or gives you blurry sound), luckily alsa can emulate OSS for them.
To do this manually, run "modprobe snd_pcm_oss" as root(this should also fix the flash sound problem).

Games:
Blurry sound in alsa(DOOM3 Quake4, ...); first make sure you loaded snd_pcm_oss, next start your game with "+set s_driver oss" (example:doom3-demo +set s_driver oss) and it will remember from now to use the oss emulation.

No sound in Wolfenstein ET; again, make sure snd_pcm_oss is loaded and next type:
echo "et.x86 0 0 direct" > /proc/asound/card0/pcm0p/oss


...and that's about it (or at least what I remember)

PS: That's cause of KDE's sound deamon(artsd) and not really alsa related.

i already had alsa-oss installed... installed alsa-tools... ran the config proggie...

seems to have fixed my probs... also did the modprobe command u said before all that... seems i have sound now in everything...

only problem i'd love to solve now is the being able to play music in amarok and play a game and have sound at the same time...

oh and before i did all that i tested the games in gnome... worked perfectly... grrrr

so thanks for that i'm pretty sure its solved my problems... if anyone has a solution for the multiple sound streams issue i'm having can ya let me know please!!

will running say amarok on arts instead of autodetect help? or oss or alsa maybe? i seem to have all the options but not all of them work... sometimes it crashes amarok (i've just installed v1.4)

mmmm turns out it only solved my problem until the next reboot...

what should i have my Sound System settings in KDE set to?

i had to run alsaconf again for sound to work in gridwars... turns out it was the solution.. not the modprobe command mentioned above...

Indeed (that's what I meant by doing it manually), to make snd_pcm_oss run permanent, add it in /etc/modules.
BTW: You can also use the aoss script from the alsa-oss package.

In default, KDE uses the aRts framework to handle everything.
I never use KDE and aRts(I'm absolutely no aRts fan either) but here's a guide for troubleshoothing:
http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?p...roubleshooting
I really hope KDE will dump aRts as soon as possible (probably from KDE 4) since it creates ten times as much problems as it solves...

This shouldn't happen (and neither is it a solution). Try running alsactl store (I doubt this will change anything since alsaconf should have already done this for you.
If you keep having this problem, you could create a script for it or keep running alsactl restore manually.

You normally do need it(only, not for apps that already work with alsa). The snd_pcm_oss module is needed for all software that doesn't support alsa but only the old OSS(or for blurry sound in apps like Doom3 and Quake4). I also needed it to get sound in Flash (and it never harms to use both at the same time anyway).

ok...

i now have arts disabled... kde notifications are running via "play" as "artsplay" won't work unless arts is started (obviously)...

sound works in everything... but still not more then one app at a time...

there is one exception though....

when i'm playing music in amarok... wine somehow managed to be able to play the sounds in one of my fav games (Poker Stars)... now why can't i get this happening with native linux games... marble blast gold (demo) refuses to even launch while i've got music playing... others run but with no sound...

is there a way to fix this? i am also not sure if OSS is working at all... ALSA seems to be going alright tho...

In replacement for aRts you can use ALSA's Dmix for it (aRts still needs to be installed for KDE though):
http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php?page=DmixPlugin


Wine uses it's own mixer settings.

looking at that page you sent me... i have created a .asoundrc file in my home folder...

didn't seem to do much... i used the basic example on the site...

but if i chuck aoss in front of anything i'm trying to run.... i get sound!

is this the whole idea?

If everything went right, you now only have to make your apps using it.
Their are more examples in that Gentoo howto (including amarok):
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_ALSA_so...he_dmix_device

thanks.... i'm pretty sure its ok now

Anyone having sound problems in Wolfenstein Enemy territory or other games can try the suggestions here. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EnemyTerritory I am running Debian Etch, not Ubuntu, but the suggestions work for most distros. If not, change the commands a little bit to fit your distro. Let me know if this helps.