ALSA "locks" sound only one program at a time
 

ALSA "locks up" the soundcard, so only one program can use the soundcard at a time. I can't listen to music and use GAIM at the same time. What happens is, the music keeps playing untill the end of the song then I get a series of queued beeps from ALSA, then the music begins again.

How can I fix this?

I'm sorry if this has been asked before. I searched, but I didn't quite know what to search for.

Hi.

Have a look here:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...48#post1614348

Dave

Thank you!

EDIT: er, appearently it's caused some problems with xmms. It'll just stop playing a song right in the middle. It stops at the same place every time, and it doesn't stop with OSS, but then I can't hear GAIM. :( what do I do?

Hmmm.

Have you tried the latest version of XMMS? I'm using XMMS, GAIM and this ALSA config, and I've never had a problem. What sound card are you using?

Dave

I'm using a built in CMI-8738-MX chipset.

I've found that the problem, which eventually leads to me not being able to use sound at all, is aplay having about a hundred instances running at once. All my sound issues cleared up when I ran killall aplay, but that only works untill it starts running multiple instances of itself again.

Why would this happen?

What happens when you run aplay with a .wav file on the command line? Do you get multiple instances?

No it doesn't create multiple instances when just running a wav file.

What do you have in the command box in the GAIM preferences? The reason I ask is that if 'aplay' is run without a file argument, it stays running doing nothing, which looks like what's happening to you.

Dave

Yes, that is what's happening. Why is that bad? What should I be doing?

Edit: oh, I understand. I don't know why gaim would call it and not play a sound. but in the box for gaim, I've got the command 'aplay'

This is a known bug in the version of dmix you're using. I have the same problem. Upgrading alsalib is likely to fix it - unfortunately dmix has been unstable until very recently and tends to deadlock the audio pipeline etc.

It seems I can't upgrade alsalib, I've got ALSA compiled into the kernel, and when I try to compile alsalib, it says I need alsa-driver, and when I run ./configure for that, it says I can't use the version compiled into the kernel. Any way around this?

You need to upgrade your distro, really. There is info on upgrading ALSA manually on the official ALSA site and wiki.

I've found out what caused the problem.

I did upgrade the kernel, but sadly, I found that sound would still stop in xmms at some point in a song. So I decided to look around the xmms options.
When using ALSA, there's an option to use Mmap mode. I had this checked. When I unchecked it, everything worked fine. So, what exactly is Mmap mode? I assume it means Memory Map Mode, but what exactly would that be?

-thanks :)

I had the same problem, and really seems to be XMMS.
I made this configuration:

And everything got good.
With 4, 5 and 6 sound instances.

Bye!