BMP, ESD, ALSA and KDE
 

I just switched from using fluxbox to KDE, I liked how it loaded the majority of the libraries at the begining as well as a few other features.

Now though I'm facing quite a few problems with bmp, my media player.

When I use the ALSA plugin, audio will often stop half way through playing without reason, this happened before, and was my reason for switching to esound or ESD

When I play sound with ESD or OSS, it works fine, but I can only use one app at a time and the volume knobs on programs are useless, presumably because arts locks the hardware volume control.

How can I fix all of these issues, and what is the optimum configuration for xmms, bmp, gaim, and xine?

Thank you for your time.

Optimal configuration for XMMS and BMP - replace them with amaroK =:-P

KDE uses aRts instead of ESD. Perhaps XMMS or BMP has an aRts plugin you can use instead of the ALSA or ESD ones?

It sounds like you need to set up a proper software mixer though since it would appear your hardware doesn't support this. aRts (KDE) and ESD both do this for you, or you can look into using Alsa's dmix.

Xine - Aside from reccommending the Kaffeine front-end, you haven't specified what your problem with this is?

turn off KDE sound manager and just run plain old OSS. Everything works just dandy with that.

Well, it seems I'd figured out how to fix it independently of everyone's help, or to a degree. I'd forgotten I made this post. :p

Anyway, I found out the volume knob wasn't working in bmp because in the ESD options I had had it set to "Use OSS volume mixer", unchecking that fixed that. Then I had xine set to use the OSS plugin because of a tutorial I had read on the itnernet. Setting it to ESD fixed that rather simply.

Now my only problem is that when I try to, say run bmp and Xine at the same time, the audio will play from both, but xine will go off sync after a while.

I'm wondering if anyone else has experienced this and how I might fix it.

-Thanks

Also: There is no arts plugin for bmp, well there is, but it's packaged seperatly and won't compile with this new version I've got apparently. :-\