Real Player and XMMS "Cannot open audio device" - SuSE 9 pro

MorningStar · 06-11-2004, 10:50 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Rounan
What's happening is you're using XMMS to play to your soundcard (using either ALSA or OSS - ALSA has an emulation layer for OSS, so if you have ALSA installed, that's what would be used).

Gnome, I believe, uses the ESD sound daemon - this program also wants to control the soundcard. It probably has a timeout, after which it relinquishes control again.
So, what happens is:
XMMS has control, and plays music happily. During this time, ESD tries to generate sound events, but the card is locked by XMMS - so it waits.
XMMS tries to change tracks, and momentarily frees the card
ESD jumps in, plays its queued sounds, and then waits for the timeout before giving up the card again
Meanwhile, XMMS tries to play the next track, finds the card locked, and instead of waiting it gives the "cannot open audio" error.

What you need to do:
make XMMS output to ESD. This way, esd controls all audio, and only one program needs to own the card at a time.

How? It should be an output option. If not, there should be a plugin - there's an xmms-arts plugin for KDE, but I can't find an equivalent for ESD (in gentoo's tree, anyway).

Search the forums. There's definitely an answer here. probably several. I know I've posted information similar to this at least 5 times.

--Rounan

Thanks for the post - I've been searching, haven't really seen anything - but you've described my problem perfectly. I don't see ESD, but options similar to the post below, plus aRTS (which still didn't hope). I'll see if I can grab an ESD plugin for XMMS.

desertc · 07-01-2007, 09:45 PM

Try restarting your sound driver.