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Thanks in advance for all your replies. I am looking for some guidance to set up my sound system correctly in Linux. I have sound working*, but not 100%. Let me explain.
After loading the modules, I have sound support in my system.
Issue:
So, the initial issue with alsa, is that I can only play 1 sound at a time. Also, sound in Quake 3 and Enemy Territory does not work! I have found that if I turn on arts, I am able to play more than 1 sound at a time. I have also found that with arts on, i can play quake 3 and Enemy Territory using "artsdsp -m quake3" or "artsdsp et -m et".
This is great, but to the best of my knowledge I am emulating a sound device. As a result, there is a big lag in my games, and also in some other applications the lag is there.
I see on the alsa install doc referenced above it says:
For professional quality, low latency audio routing use JACK - The Jack Audio Connection Kit
Is this a replacement for arts? I have installed it and ran it, but I don't know how to make clients use it. Could i go "jack quake3" or something like that?
I have also seen in many forums "don't use arts", like it is older technology, and people look down on it. Is that true?
Have you tried playing the games as root? If that works, then chances are it is just a permission issue with ALSA, and this is a common problem for many applications.
I don't see any reason why ALSA should not be able to play more than one soun d, but the on-board AC97 sound might be the culprit. I have the same board, but I use a different sound card, and I have no problems with multiple sounds at once.
Are you sure that you have the correct modules loaded for the AC97 sound? Can you post the output of lsmod?
Yeah I think it may be hardware specific... though I don't have another card to try
I've posted my modules below. (BTW, i found that by following these steps I was able to get sound in quake 3 through alsa : http://lunar-linux.org/pipermail/lun...ay/001457.html . same thing for enemy territory, except i replaced quake3.x86 with et.x86)
That fixed my problem with xmms. Now I gotta get my Gaim to play sounds same way as well. So far I tried to play sounds using command aplay -Dintel8x0 %s, but I get error: aplay: set_params:832: Channels count non available. I think it's because Gaim's sounds are mono...
never used gaim. i use aMSN, and I don't like the sounds anyways hopefully someone else can answer your question. now it seems that whenever i change focus on xmms to another app, (alt+tab) xmms stops playing sound and won't start again until I close and kill and lingering xmms processes. anyone seen this?
After I changed my .asoundrc file as I described in this post, xmms started to work much better, but it still hangs once in a while. I can't really tell what it's caused by, though. Sometimes I would be just reading something in my browser and it suddenly would stop playing.
COOL! we'll get there yet ZiGiE. i have copied your .asoundrc script. How did you find that? So far it is running well, though i am experiencing some issues as well.
perhaps we could compare some things here:
1. open xmms and kmix at the same time.. now play with the volume on xmms, what control in kmix goes up? It should be the first master volume control, but for me the PCM device is going up and down, and when it's full blast it totally distorts the sound output.
2. I had a problem with xine not playing any sound while xmms was open, but gxine was working perfectly.. i compared my two config files in ~/.gxine and ~/.xine and found that when i modified these 2 options:
audio.alsa_default_device:default
and
audio.alsa_front_device:front
change default and front to dmixer, everything worked for me.
3. still some apps will not run when xmms is playing music. Realplayer for example.. and I am guessing quake 3, though I don't feel like restarting x right now
Location: Bible Belt Appalachian Mnts of Western VA/Eastern KY
Distribution: Still Hoppin.
Posts: 98
Rep:
I think you have to have a sound server or whatever its called running to play two sounds simultaneously. Arts for kde or ??? for gnome(i dont use gnome). I think the sound server mixes the sounds or something and pipes them through /dev/dsp. But, then what if you didnt use gnome or kde? I really am not sure. But it seems like i read that somewhere, quite possibly in an older linux book at school.
Originally posted by zarathustra674 I think you have to have a sound server or whatever its called running to play two sounds simultaneously. Arts for kde or ??? for gnome(i dont use gnome). I think the sound server mixes the sounds or something and pipes them through /dev/dsp. But, then what if you didnt use gnome or kde? I really am not sure. But it seems like i read that somewhere, quite possibly in an older linux book at school.
Software mixing is the ability to play multiple sound files or applications at the same time through the same device. There are many ways to have software mixing in the Linux environment. Usually it requires a server application such as ARTSD, ESD, JACK... The list is large and the apps can often be confusing to use. These days we have a native plugin for ALSA called the dmix (direct mixing) plugin. It allows software mixing in an easy to use syntax and without the hassle of installing/understanding a new application first.
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