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

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Mon, 11 Sep 2006 @ 14:08 -0500, Mike Hebel said:

> 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.

Yeah, that's pretty normal unless you use a sound driver that can do
it all in software.  Eats CPU that way, but it's not too awfully bad.

> > 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*

It happens.

What UNIX really needs is a standard API and filesystem interface (AFI?)
for sound so the drivers can present the same interface to all software,
and we won't need things like esd on *any* system.

Of course, I suppose that's what ALSA is, but it is Linux only so it
does little good for Solaris, *BSD, etc.

> > On Slackware systems, they are in the alsa-utils package.
> 
> I'm talking about like alsaconf.  Or has that been depreciated?

No, it is still around, and should be in alsa-utils.

I don't know what the package would be called on a non-Slackware system
offhand, but it should be something like that.

-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["Consulting wouldn't be what it is today
without Microsoft Windows" -- Chris Pinkham]