I got my sound up and running on my Fedora Core 3, running a soundmax sound card (alsa) on a Compaq Presario laptop. I've had some problems, though, and am not sure where to go from here.

I installed MP3 support for XMMS, and selected the ALSA output driver. It works, but often stops for no apparent reason, and then claims it cannot access the sound card. After a few moments, I can get it to play again. If I adjust the volume via kmix (I'm primarily a KDE user), it instantly terminates the sound (no error, just no output). If I fire up the RedHat sound card detector, and play the sample sound, I suddenly get output from XMMS.

I prefer amaroK, so I installed it (no MP3 support... ) ... and it only lists gstreamer or arts as possible "engines". gstreamer is the only one that will work. Amarok, however, is very touchy. If I scroll down a page in my web browser, open a file in a text editor or open a konsole window, the playback is interrupted until I stop the activity. However, when I am playing XMMS, it doesn't do this (no playback interruption).

I must say, beyond the lack of MP3 and NTFS support, I have come to like Fedora (at least on this laptop... it runs very well on this hardware).

I get no output from dmesg on any of this stuff...

Any ideas?

Sounds like what my old on board sound card did a while back. Some do not have hardware mixing and can only play one sound at a time. I bought a SoundBlaster and it works with whatever Iplay now. I can listen to a CD and still get the sound when new email has arrived for example.

Not 100% sure in your case but may be worth looking into.

Hope that help.

Interesting, but I don't think its a hardware problem. It doesn't do it under windows, and it hasn't done it under older linux distros. My initial reaction was that it was a mixer problem - maybe a gstreamer or arts problem. I have no idea though - I'm no linux expert (I'm a work in progress... he he).

You may need to remember that some distros include a software mixer. It depends on the setup. You may also want to note that windoze does almost everything in software. There is very liitle hardware work in windoze anymore. Modems is a good example, sound cards are yet another.

I still suspect that is the problem. It was for sure what was wrong with mine. Mine would have worked fine in windoze but not in Linux because the mixing had to be done with software which Linux does not have, even Mandrake didn't have it.

Other than that, no clue here.

Later

I suppose its possible that the mixer is dying, or fluctuating. Often it acts like there isn't enough CPU or IRQ time for the sound to play... causing the intermittent interruptions.

Also, sometimes my sound quits, and won't come back until I run the RedHat audio detection tool and play the sample sound. The second I click that button (the "play sample sound" button), my sound comes back. That sounds more like a module, don't you think? But if that were the case, it should show up using dmesg, right?

Do any of the mixers log errors - say, to /var/log ?