I am having problems with my sound system today, in fact RedHat, sound and myself have never gotten along very well. FreeAmp is hit or miss an on this system is has been a miss since day one RH7.0. On other systems I can remember dorking with sound modules and programs like sndcfg for hour, even days to get it to work right, then it would work for a few weeks then stop until I ran some script I had created to re-enable the system. I have to be doing something wrong, it cannot be this much of a pain for everybody. I could reboot but I hate doing that and loosing all the windows I have open.

My recent problem goes like this:
1) Install RH7.0 on an Athlon Tbird system with an Ensoniq|CT5880
2) Upgrade to RH7.2 a year later
3) Audio is a hit or miss thing, programs like xmms and FreeAmp hang while mpg321, real*, aumix and gtv work fine.
4) Yesterday I noticed that when gtv and mpg321 ran at the same time the sound was mixed together and I though, "wow how did they do that?"
5) Today mpg321, mpg123 no longer works with the same mp3s as yesterday (Error opening libao oss driver) while gtv has no problems.

I imagine a reboot will fix this problem but I would rather leave the Microsoft screwdriver by the windows machine. which I rebooted 5 line above. It will not fix my Freeamp problem (all the latest versions for the last year) either.

So I did some looking around, sudo sndconfig tells me I have an Ensoniq CT5880 (Probably my problem but I can remember sound issues with SB hardware in the past on other machines) but with sndconfig tries to play the sound sample it just hangs.
So I try to cat my .login to /dev/audio and that hangs too, when I can my .login to /dev/audio1 I hear the loud static that I would expect.

Anybody have a clue for me? I'm not your usual idiot, I use Linux to write Perl/Web applications and have used Unix for the last 16 years. Sound didn't show up on my Unix machines until recently but I was avoiding getting my PHD in Linux sound in hope that it would just work one day that day is not today.

If somebody helps me out I'll help out the economy and buy new speakers that are not rated in PMPO watts

hummss
well how is that /dev/dsp look? i would assume permisions are fine but lets look - what does ls -l /dev/dsp* give? also - what does /dev/audio look like? (same command replace dsp w/ audio).

my 1st guess is that there a sound deamon running - like esd.
try a ps -ef and see if anything is running which may be occuping the DSP, hopefully you know most the programs running - if thre are some which have sound in them or esd then try killing them and then playing some sounds.

shit ive bin trying to get sound to work ever since i installed it about a week ago it still doesnt work i have a enonziq to and im runnin slackware 8.0 it just wont work it just freezes the song when ever i try and play it and then it freezes xmms

Well I rebooted (to play a game of Kohan) and when Linux came back mpg321 still did not work so I must have done something. Perhaps it was the random button pressing and knob twisting I did when the sound :smash: broke.

So, pbharris wanted to know some more details:

hercules:~> ll /dev/dsp*
crw------- 1 lavelle root 14, 3 Aug 30 2001 /dev/dsp
crw------- 1 lavelle root 14, 3 May 24 2001 /dev/dsp0
crw------- 1 lavelle root 14, 19 Aug 30 2001 /dev/dsp1
crw------- 1 lavelle root 14, 35 May 24 2001 /dev/dsp2
crw------- 1 lavelle root 14, 51 May 24 2001 /dev/dsp3
crw------- 1 lavelle root 55, 0 Aug 30 2001 /dev/dsp56k
hercules:~> ps auxwww | fgrep -i dsp
lavelle 9730 0.0 0.2 1728 560 pts/2 R 08:29 0:00 fgrep -i dsp


To go a little farther hercules:~> ll /dev/audio*
crw------- 1 lavelle root 14, 4 Aug 30 2001 /dev/audio
crw------- 1 lavelle root 14, 4 May 24 2001 /dev/audio0
crw------- 1 lavelle root 14, 20 Aug 30 2001 /dev/audio1
crw------- 1 lavelle root 14, 36 May 24 2001 /dev/audio2
crw------- 1 lavelle root 14, 52 May 24 2001 /dev/audio3
crw------- 1 lavelle root 14, 7 Aug 30 2001 /dev/audioctl


hercules:~> lsmod
Module Size Used by
soundcore 4464 0 (autoclean)
agpgart 27552 3 (autoclean)
NVdriver 819584 9 (autoclean)
binfmt_misc 6416 1
parport_pc 14768 1 (autoclean)
lp 6416 0 (autoclean)
parport 25568 1 (autoclean) [parport_pc lp]
8139too 12896 1
ide-scsi 8320 0
scsi_mod 95792 1 [ide-scsi]
ide-cd 27040 0
cdrom 28640 0 [ide-cd]
nls_iso8859-1 2832 1 (autoclean)
nls_cp437 4352 1 (autoclean)
vfat 9744 1 (autoclean)
fat 32512 0 (autoclean) [vfat]
usb-uhci 21600 0 (unused)
usbcore 51808 1 [usb-uhci]
ext3 64624 3
jbd 41056 3 [ext3]

mpg321 works after running sndcfg. I ran it when gtv stopped working. Then I got xmms working by setting the output to oss. Wow, never used xmms, I think it is better than freeamp which also works now.

Well I hope this keeps working as I plan on dumping my Audio Navigator 80 Watt (PMPO aka. 6 watts RMS)

I'm sorry for the rant, Linux sound just gets me all riled up (I'm sure this isn't the last problem I am going to have). Thanx for the follow-ups.

doh! forgot to follow up again. well good to see it is working