I have sound... mostly.

If I run a cd player, it's good.
If I put a DVD in xine, it's good.
I get the system beep when I tab complete
I get all sorts of system sounds in KDE, too many in fact, open/close windows etc.
If I browse to /usr/share/sounds I can click on the .wavs and they play in noatrun

But...
If I play Battle of Wesnoth, no sound.
If I load a .ram file in Realplayer, no sound.
If I run /usr/bin/aplay on a .wav file, it just hangs.

I'm running debian sarge, I've recompiled the kernel... it's 2.6.8

I'm stumped. Somewhere while trying to fix it someone mentioned realplayer doesn't have alsa drivers so maybe you have to do something with that... it mentioned setting the AUDIO variable, but I have nothing set for my audio variable. But I couldn't tell when that commentary was made, or about what version of Realplayer for that matter.

Hi skiflyer,
try this script...its from kano who is kanotix creator....kanotix is debian based.All his scripts will work with a pure debian box just fine.I use all his scripts when needed.He has an awsome ATI and Nvidia install script....2 commands...a reboot...and bam...all done

here is his script to download all the codecs needed for a all around sound experiance...I believe real player too;

http://kanotix.com/files/install-codecs.sh


heres the site
http://kanotix.com/files

Feel free to ask about any other script.
Fix font script is used sometimes after a driver install where fonts get borked and need to be re registered.

I'd say this is because you're using a sound server (aRTs). Try looking for an aRTs output plugin in those apps where sound doesn't work. If you can't find one then run the app like so: artsdsp command. So for example for realplayer, you type artsdsp realplay <some file.>. See if that works.

Unfortunately the artsdsp method didn't help any... though it gave me the following warning when tried with realplay

Warning: LD_PRELOAD="/lib/libdl.so.2"

And, I don't see how that script can help me much since it appears prety mplayer specific, but I didn't notice anything harmful in it, so I gave it a go... also no difference.

And I'm not seeing an aRTs plugin in the apps.

Is there a way to verify if I'm running aRTs or not?

Are you using alsa? Then the problem is that those programs are set to use OSS.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...realplayer+oss

To verify if you're using aRTs you can do a ps -A |grep artsd. If there's no output then it's not running. If a line containing the word "artsd" shows up then it's running. What you can do then is a killall -s 15 artsd (as root) and then try realplayer or something else that doesn't currently work. If it starts to work then aRTs is your problem.

What aRTs does is take over your sound output and it does any mixing itself. It is however totally crap and I've heard many a horror story about it. I would recommend not running it and using ALSA's native dmix plugin to mix sound.

Err.... It's not mplayer specific in the least. It's just a wrapper to try to get some binaries to run using arts output even though they were not originally designed to do so.

Sorry to be ambigous, I was referring to the script posted by ironwalker.

Anyway, I followed the link, and that indeed fixed the realplayer problem... don't have time to test the rest at the moment.

For those who may stumbled on it later... the rundown for me was

apt-get intsall alsa-oss
export AUDIO=/dev/dsp0
aoss realplay

You may want to create a script that does that in case you use realplayer from your browser or something.