i installed realplayer and when i try to play audio it's saying and in an irc channel i was told i need to have it use esd, i have no clue what tha tmeans, if it's true and how to do it. any help appreciated. i'm using ubuntu!

ok....

basically realplayer is trying to use a form of audio output which requires dedicated use of the card. This should be oss output, which is crap and old and deprecated. in Gnome, you sit esd (enlightened sound daemon or something) to accept multiple sound inputs and output them to the single card nicely. In KDE, it's arts. I've no idea how to make realplayer use these different outputs, but it's presumably in there somewhere. Oh actaully, check Preferences, then Performance, then Sound Card. instead of OSS output, you should actually be running ALSA, which is the low level replacement for oss. Alsa can "pretend" to be oss for apps which are crap and old, like realplayer. In this instance the best solution is to configure alsa to accept multiple connections (something that really should be a default these days...) using the dmix plugin. However esd / arts outputs are a much quicker solution.

Hi,
The sound drivers in Linux, alsa or oss, only let one application use sound at one time. You are probably getting that error because another program is already using the sound card. An easy way to solve your problem would just be to close that program and try again.

A sound server is a way to let lots of programs use sound all at once. Programs give there sound stuff to the sound server which mixes everything into one channel and gives that to alsa or oss.

There are two sound servers that I know of, esd and aRts. I hear that esd is bad and aRts is good, but I'm not sure. Try searching for arts and esd in google. The website for aRts is http://www.arts-project.org/.

Sorry I can't help you any more, but I don't know that much about sound in linux.

just to point out that alsa DOES accept multiple connections when configured to do so. it also works a LOT better than either esd or arts.

i have esd enlightened installed, i am using alsa, and i don't see a "performance -> prefrences"
post 2, no there isn't anything using it, i can open rythmbox, it will play music, immediatlly close it, try to play in realplayer nothing, reopen rythmbox and hit play on a song, it'll play (: so it's not that...any other suggestions? the only reason i'm trying to figure this out is because when stremaing a radio station in rythmbox after everysong there is an error dialog "unexpected end of stream" i was told use realplayer, and i can't..so IDK

Try pressing the Ctrl and Esc keys to open up a small window which shows running programs. If realplay is running, kill it then close that window and try realplay again.
You can also do this from the terminal with the command: ps -ax and kill the related number.

You could use a media player that is not "crap and old and deprecated." (acid_kewpie). My favorite is gxine, which is a front-end to xine-lib. To get it to work with realmedia files, read this.

mplayer is another option.

Guess I just don't understand all the negative stuff about realplayer. It works fine quite well for me.

well by that i meant that closed souce apps like realplayer are released on an extremely infrequent basis. They are generally not interested in getting all the nice new bells and whistles working either, once it works they stop their developers anre release it, and get them back to something that earns the company real money....

I have run into this on a couple of the distros I've installed. The problem I had was aRts related. Never even opened a command line, just used yast (suse 9.1) to disable aRts after a few seconds of innactivity. If aRts is enabled on your system, you may want to try this.