/dev/dsp doesn't exist
 

I am trying to use mplayer on FC11. "-ao oss" and "-ao pulse" don't work, because /dev/dsp doesn't exist. "-ao alsa" has problems with freezing every second or so. I can unfreeze the playback by hitting the space bar twice (pause/unpause). But of course it isn't practical to do so every second. Also, playback is prohibitively slow with the alsa driver.

How can I get /dev/dsp created so I can use the other sound drivers?

Thanks,

P.

You have provided no hardware info and no info on what driver is actually being loaded so your question can't be answered in any particular detail. Basically, the "other sound drivers" create /dev/dsp. If you are using a driver that does not create it, then that driver is probably creating its own /dev entry.

You need to unload the driver you don't want and force the load of the driver you do want. How you do this depends on the driver and why the wrong one is getting loaded. You might want to blacklist the driver that currently gets loaded, and you might want to make an appropriate entry in /etc/modules or /etc/modules.conf.

The audio hardware is "Intel 82801/BAM AC'97 audio controller".
lsmod says sound modules are:
snd_intel8x0
snd_ac97_codec
ac97_bus
snd_pcm
snd_timer
snd
pcspkr
soundcore
snd_page_alloc
.

Perplxxt

I found a work-around.

alias mplayer='padsp mplayer'

The "padsp" program causes accesses of /dev/dsp to be routed through the Pulse Audio system. Then I put "ao=oss" into my ~/.mplayer/config file, to use the OSS driver instead of the ALSA driver. It works much better now.

Do you maybe not have alsa compiled in your kernel?

you should have alsa compiled with OSS emulation. --with-oss=yes

you might also need to modprobe the oss modules. after boot. ogle tends to not want to run until I do this on one of my boxes.

modprobe snd-mixer-oss
modprobe snd-pcm-oss
modprobe snd-seq-oss

/dev/dsp might not exist, but /dev/dsp1 might. And you might need to setup a udev rule for /dev/dsp, or manually ln -s /dev/dsp1 /dev/dsp to create it. And various other tricks depending on how audio is handled on your system.

I use the software that came with the Fedora 11 distribution. How would I be able to tell whether alsa has OSS compiled in?

No /dev/dsp* exists. Seting up a udev rule is a bit beyond my competence. As I already have a workaround, I think I will leave well enough alone, but thanks for your advice.

P.

Automatically loading snd-*-oss
 

This helped me and solved a few sound problems I experienced.
I wonder, how can I make my machine load these modules automatically every time I boot my computer?

Thanks...

Loading those modules will create /dev/dsp (OSS emulation). To add them by default, create a file in /etc/modprobe.d/