Why does changinag a job from fg to bg mess up the sound?
 

Hi all,

Call me lazy. I know this is a trivial question but it is a useability one for me and it's quite frustrating.

When I kick off a plaympeg job either in the background then move it to the foreground or vice versa, the sound is all garbled. Why does this happen? How can I fix it?

The longer story. My home systems are all linux, hooked up to my stereo and hold all my music. So while I'm working in another room, I'll ssh in and quickly kick off plaympeg to have some tunes going. If I have it in the foreground, I can't get to my alsamixer, so I ctrl-z the job then use bg to continue playing in the bg. This frees up the shell for me to use alsamixer. The problem is, when I shift the task to the background, the sound is garbled until the next song. Frustrating if it's a good tune! The same thing happens if I move the background job to the foreground.

Is this a plaympeg issue or a jobs/bg/fg issue?

Distro's FC 2 & 3. (I haven't tested this in SuSE 9.1)

It's not a problem I have heard of but as work around rather than a direct solution you may want to try using "screen" as opposed to bash job control.

My sound gets garbled too, mostly through browser/X action, but not consistently. Same thing in that the current song becomes garbled and the next is OK. I usually play my tunes with a script run as at atjob. I am attributing the problem most likely to onboard sound, and plan at some point to throw in my old SB Live! board to see if that takes care of the problem. I never had problems with it until I upgraded my system and thought I would just use the "00:11.5 Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8233/A/8235/8237 AC97 Audio Controller (rev 60)" sound that came on the ASUS motherboard. At the same time, I also moved to a 2.6 kernel and switched to Alsa, so there are alternative hypotheses. What is your setup?

David, thank you for the suggestion, screen is a handy tool to have around. The problem is that after the first plaympeg session finishes, screen thinks its job is over and closes. One song at a time, kinda like playing old 45's. I'll probably create a script that can work around this problem which shouldn't be too difficult.

Kicking of a process in the background is so easy/habitual with &. Hopefully I can find the problem rather than work around it.

fsbooks,
I'm running FC3... well, mostly. I had FC2 and upgraded to FC3 via yum so I'm sure it's a bastardized version. We'll call it FC2.8 (2.8 is almost 3)
Kernel: 2.6.9-1
00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corp. 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 01)
Alsa
In modprobe.conf,
install snd-intel8x0 /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install snd-intel8x0 && /usr/sbin/alsactl restore >/dev/null 2>&1 || :
remove snd-intel8x0 { /usr/sbin/alsactl store >/dev/null 2>&1 || : ; }; /sbin/modprobe -r --ignore-remove snd-intel8x0

Are we the only folks that notice this or the only people that care?

If you start screen and run it with 2 bash shells then you should be able to use one for playing the tracks and the other to have your mixer permenantly open, neither of the shells will exit unless you ask them too. The other advantage of this is that you can detach the screen in one room and reattach it in the other if you were to move again.

Very reasonable suggestion. I'll give it a shot when I return home next weekend.
Thanks. :)

Working hard to be lazy,
J.