Sup LQ, been a while. Hope y'all done well without me...


Anyway, we're back to the old sound issues in Linux. I run a home-grown box for my cousin with Debian linux and Gnome on the desktop. Its been running for a year, and I have zero complaints (kernel upgrade and wireless issues notwithstanding, that's another thread). I always knew there was something wrong with the system sound, but now its become a true obstacle.

He uses one main thing on the box: youtube.com. That means the flash player must work WITH sound. I just tried to set him up to listen to my podcast using Rhythmbox (a quality player IMO), but that uses ESD. If I run esd on the command line, Rythmbox works fine, but no sound from firefox/flash. Cancel esd, and I get the opposite.

Is there a way around this, to have both Rhythmbox and Firefox have sound at the same time? Or have I hit one of the old linux sound roadblocks?

-dave

Gnash player works on youtube now, though it refused to play MySpace vids last month when I tried it.

Can't you just turn off the sound server and let apps talk to ALSA directly? I don't know what the config of your system is. Since a while Ubuntu has been coming with dmix (ALSA's software mixer) enabled by default so multiple apps can use the sound card at the same time, even on machines with single channel audio (most laptop built-in cards are like this).

There remains a problem with apps which still use OSS to talk to the audio hardware - these will not share with other ALSA apps. However, most of them can be run with aoss, and then they play nice. It doesn't' work with all of them, but there aren't so many left these days (thank goodness), so it's less of a problem than it used to be.

It is the first point on the list of features which I am looking for in audio apps - that they can talk ALSA so they will share my sound card with other apps. I don't a sound server at all, and everything seems to be fine.