[geeks] Ubuntu sound question - esd w/alsa...

[Mike Hebel]

Thus spake Charles Shannon Hendrix:
> Mon, 11 Sep 2006 @ 12:28 -0500, Mike Hebel said:
>
>> Has anybody found a good way to get these to play together yet?  I'm
>> using
>> Dapper on a ThinkPad A31 and I'm getting the usual conflicts between
>> alsa
>> and esd.
>
> What problems do you see?
>
> What kind of sound hardware do you have?  Some sound hardware has no
> multiplexing or hardware mixing support, and can't handle more than one
> accessing program at a time.  If you have that kind of sound hardware (a
> lot of motherboard sound is like that) then you need to make sure you
> have ALSA compiled/configured to offer software mixing or only one
> program will be able to use your sound devices at a time.
>

I'm using an Intel 8x0 sound chip so no hardware multiplexing.  The sound
would work fine in anything but a Gnome app ONLY if esd was disabled.

Or more precisely with esd enabled I could only get sound in Gnome apps. 
Anything that didn't use esd wouldn't be able to open dsp.

> Sound cards like the Live! series have full hardware support for this so
> the ALSA driver gets help with mixing and other issues like that.
>
> If you can avoid even loading esd, you'll be better off in any case.
>
> I don't have problems with esd myself, at least not outside of the fact
> that esd sucks in general.

It sounds uber stupid now but I solved it by doing something I don't
normally do - I looked at the GUI utilities in Gnome and there's a
Multimedia Systems Selector.  (Maybe that got loaded by Automatix I don't
know.)  Set that to ALSA and the damn thing works like a charm now.

*headdesk*

>> I also can't seem to find the alsa configuration utility - has that
>> been removed?
>
> Are you talking about alsactl, alsamixer, etc?
>
> On Slackware systems, they are in the alsa-utils package.

I'm talking about like alsaconf.  Or has that been depreciated?

Mike Hebel
----
"It sticks to your mouth like library paste, has a stronger kick than
toxic waste, there's nothing that you'll ever taste like 307 Ale!" - Tom
Smith - 307 Ale