What's the deal with sound servers?
 

I must admit to being confused by all the different sound systems available... Arts, OSS, Alsa, Esd, Esound, etc. I have no idea if these are all the same sort of thing, or if some are designed to work together, or operate at different layers, etc.

I have an old Aureal-based card, using drivers from the Aureal Linux Hacking page on Sourceforge, and although it works fine in XMMS, the MIDI support doesn't seem to work at all. Other sound support is patchy at best. My bundled movie-playing software that came with KDE/Mandrake 9 won't play the audio part of the movie clips. Backspacing in a console window produces a little bell icon but no sound, most of the time. The other day though, it did make a ding sound! 4 or 5 times, before a message box came up telling me there was a 'sound server CPU overload' at which point it stopped working :) Also, no SDL-based games seem to be able to use sound. I am not at my Linux machine at the moment and therefore can't post a more accurate error message, but I think it said that it couldn't open /dev/audio. Yet obviously other systems work...

So I guess my post has 2 aspects to it:

a) Any idea why my sound support is patchy (besides the fact that I'm using unofficial drivers)? I understand that I will probably need to post more info to get a good answer, but I dunno what I need to post yet. :)

b) What is the status of all these sound systems, why do so many exist, and is there any kind of standardisation approaching?

BTW, if there's some sort of FAQ on this, I won't be offended if I'm merely pointed at it. :) Any info is welcome.

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Sound-HOWTO/index.html

I've never read it though, so YMMV..

Ok, here's my 'take' on that:

a. Because your soundcard didn't get taken in very well by a lot of programmers so the support for it is exactly that: patchy at best. It was also due to a few other things like the company getting taken over, no additional support from new company on drivers, a bit of finger pointing on who was gonna take over... I too had an Aureal and didn't have much luck. Gave up, got an SB Live, and have had excellent audio since.

b. Here's where I'm just "giving you what I know" type of thing, no official word ;) Arts is KDE's sound server (personally think it's not all that great). Esd and Esound I believe are the same thing, both replacements/alternatives for ArtsD. These are both daemons (or servers) to asist with managing the sounds sent to the card ( again, I'm just telling you what I think, I really don't have a strong grasp on it all yet) and determining what needs what to play and when. Seems more to get in the way than anything for me personally, but probably works great for some people. I actually disable arts first thing on a new system.

Alsa: This is the do-all, end-all of audio drivers for linux. This is likely going to be the route you'll find any decent support on for ANY card, but more specifically those off the wall ones. ALSA is the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture. It's currently being placed in the test kernels and will be built into the future stable ones. It's an excellent replacement for your standard audio drivers (read modules) and is [usually] well documented. This is not a server, but rather a driver for the card.

Cool

Hmm. Since I didn't agree with Creative's malicious lawsuit designed to force Aureal out of business, I hope to avoid buying a Creative sound card if at all possible. Hopefully some other brands will be well-supported by my system...

Aha... Esd probably means E Sound Daemon, yeah?

So disabling arts and getting ALSA running might be a good idea? I'll read that how-to and look into it. Thanks.

There are others that are supported quite nicely, SB Live was just a cheap solution (not for me at the time though ;) ).

Good Luck, and here's ALSA's site:
http://alsa-project.org

Cool

artsd is going to be the default for kde applications. It is an analog Real Time synthesizer(aRTs). I allows for multiple streams of sound to use the sound device at same time. One thing it says is that you need to tell it to redirect none KDE application sound with artsdsp.