Alright, this is kind of an odd problem -
I have sound setup in KDE. When I go to the Sound System Module and click the Test Sound button, I hear sound. If I open tvtime, or xmms, or xine or anything else for that matter, I get sound.

When I open firefox and check out some flash animations - no sound.

What do I need to (re?)configure to get sound?

I''m on Slackware 10, KDE 3.2.x
PC has a TvTuner card based on bttv and a SoundBlaster Audigy

Any ideas?

Do sounds work on Flash in Konqueror?

you know - it doesn't

-Jason

do you have two sources of sound open at the same time? When i have XMMS open and a flash document on a webpage loads, it never has sound. I have to close XMMS and restart firefox for it to work. But this is a driver problem, and the one i'm using right now is basic - haven't gotten around to modifying it.

No, I've tried just running firefox alone w/ no xmms. I can play the flash movies, get no sound, then start xmms and voila, there's sound.

Same with the Sound Test Panel.

-JAson

Yes you bring up a good point -- are you (original poster) using OSS or ALSA? If you're using OSS, upgrade to ALSA now (it's about time anyway). OSS only allows one source of output to be piped to your card at once, so if a sound server---such as aRts---is running, it is probably occupying the one source of output that can be piped to.

A good way to tell is by running and see if there are any snd-whatever modules. Mine, for example, lists snd-via82xx among others. If you do not see that, you are probably not running ALSA but OSS.

A short-term solution if you don't want to switch to ALSA, would be to enable the option in Konqueror (forget where it is, I don't have KDE installed) that allows you to pipe any plugin sounds through aRts. That would only work for Konqueror, of course.

The system is running alsa 1.7.

Curious note, when I attempt to turn on full-duplex in the KDE Sound System module, I get an error saying :

Sound server informational message:
Error while initializing the sound driver:
device: default can't be opened for capture (Permission denied)
The sound server will continue, using the null output device.

And then no sounds plays. If I uncheck the option I can hear the test music.

What permissions do I have to change to enable full duplex?

OOOhhhh, even more confusing stuff ...

I was looking at the options for xine, and tried the -A option which allows you to choose what audio system to use.

When I use "-A oss" the sound works, when I use "-A alsa" it doesn/t. When I don't use the "-A" it works.

So does that mean part of my system is using the OSS and par tof it is in ALSA?

I'm thoroughly lost now.

how sure are you that you are running ALSA and that you have ALSA drivers, and not OSS drivers, loaded?

It is of course possible to have ALSA installed but be completely unused.

well
when I use alsactl to restore settings it works
I use alsamixer to adjust the volumes

The KDE sound system declares it's using ALSA
XMMS also claims to be using ALSA as it's output. And when I adjust the volume in that, it changes the same volume in alsamixer

So I'm fairly confident I'm using ALSA

-Jason

Try running firefox from the command line but put artsdsp in front of it. In other words, if your firefox binary is called firefox then you would type artsdsp firefox. Then see if you get sound in flash.

Yeah..
does the trick
But is there any other way of automating this...?

As for the "permission denied" error, make sure you have read and write access to /dev/dsp. On my gentoo system, this is a link to /dev/sound/dsp, which is owned by root and group 'audio.'. I just added myself to the audio group to get the permissions I needed. Good luck.

How do you normally launch firefox? The Debian menu? If so, then copy /usr/lib/menu/mozilla-firefox to /etc/menu/mozilla-firefox. Then (as root) edit this new file (/etc/menu/mozilla-firefox) and change the command to read artsdsp firefox. Then run update-menus as the user (not root).

You can do similar things for any debian package.

Amazingly that still doesn't do the trick.
I'm forever stuck.

I have sound virtually everywhere else. In konsole I have the little annoying beeps if you back up too much.
I can play music through xmms and amp.
I've setup xine to play music through the arts server

But stupid friggin flash stuff ain't working. Maybe I should try reinstalling flash?

I'll give that a shot