Am Mittwoch, 4. August 2004 09:23 schrieb Guenter Lichtenberg:

On Wednesday 04 August 2004 03:35, Marc Collin wrote:

...

hi

i can play music, mp3 without problem under kde... but i the kde control center - sound, kde notification sound system is on... but i have no sound when an event happen...

same thing for kopete... i receive a message or send one... but no sound happen

any idea?

i use suse 9.1

thanks

Hi - I had the same problem on SuSE 9.1. I solved it by - strangely enough - setting the external player to 'artsplay'. You do this by starting the control center and then going to 'Sound&Multimedia'->'System Notifications' and then push 'Player Settings' and fill in artsplay.

It is maybe a SuSE 9.1 problem, my PC at work has red-hat and there it worked without any external player (as it should).

Hope it helps gl

If you find that behavior strange, then you have deficiency in understanding the linux sound system. Nearly all sound chips can only be opened by one sound application at one time. Only exception I know are EMU10K1 based soundcards like Soundblaster 512 or Live! (and perhaps Audigy?) To get sound from two applications at one, you have to use a sound daemon like arts daemon (short artsd). This daemon opens the sound device and listens for connections from arts aware applications. These can connect to arts daemon and give it the sound stream. Artsd after that looks if any other application is playing, too and if neccessary it mixes all sound streams and then sends the one mixed sound stream to the soundcard. Artsd releases the sound device when not used for some seconds. Then you can open your music player and start playing. If after that an arts-aware app will play sound, it gives sound to artsd, but this time artsd cannot open the device. It's blocked by the music player. So one solution is to get the music player arts-aware, too. Examples are the arts plugin for xmms. Another aproach is more difficult, but it works better, because it has no noticable latency (the time between application starts playing and the time the sound comes out of your boxes). You can choose to use alsa as backend for anything. Configure alsa to use the dmix plugin (http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php?page=DmixPlugin). This does the software mixing like artsd, but it does it somehow better and faster. If someone is in need for further explanation, then ask here on this list. After that, configure arts to use alsa as backend. If asound.conf is configured right, it qill use the alsa dmix plugin. After that try to switch all other sound applications to use native alsa, too. This works wonderful with apps like xine, mplayer, xmms and if you use the aoss libraries with LD_PRELOAD (I can explain this further, too), then you even can get mozilla, opera and helixplayer / realplayer to use alsa with dmix plugin, too. So, thanks for reading this biiiig mail and I hope I could give some light into this ever repeating question. Greets, Daniel

On Wednesday 04 August 2004 18:59, Daniel Eckl wrote:

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Hi -       I had the same problem on SuSE 9.1. I solved it by - strangely enough - setting the external player to 'artsplay'. You do this by starting the control center and then going to 'Sound&Multimedia'->'System Notifications' and then push 'Player Settings' and fill in artsplay.

It is maybe a SuSE 9.1 problem, my PC at work has red-hat and there it worked without any external player (as it should).

Hope it helps gl

If you find that behavior strange, then you have deficiency in understanding the linux sound system.

Hi Daniel - I'd like to clarify something: First, I'm sure I have many deficiencies in my understanding of the linux sound system. But I do understand that you cannot play sound from more than one application if you don't use a sound demon. What I meant with 'strangely' was that I have to put in 'artsplay' as the *external* player if I want to hear any sound notifications, even if no other application uses the soundcard. I had to do it on SuSE 9.1 but not under redhat, which I found strange (and I'm not saying that it has to do something with SuSE, it might well be that I did something that in turn required to set artsplay explicitely). I understood 'external' as any other player besides artsplay, but maybe I'm wrong. But - no hard feelings: Your email did shed some light on other issues, so thanks gl -- Günter Lichtenberg ========>mailto:lichten@sron.nl SRON (EOS) Sorbonnelaan 2 3584 CA UTRECHT the Netherlands Tel.: +31 30 253 5719 FAX : +31 30 254 0860

On Sunday 08 August 2004 10:47, Daniel Eckl wrote:

Zitat von Guenter Lichtenberg :

...

What I meant with 'strangely' was that I have to put in 'artsplay' as the *external* player if I want to hear any sound notifications, even if no other application uses the soundcard.

Hi Guenter!

artsd _is_ an application which uses the soundcard.

If artsd is running, it opens the soundcard and blocks it for other applications. Even if no arts _client_ it playing sound. It just runs in the background and keeps the soundcard open.

That's why you have to use artsplay, because it does not use the soundcard directly but uses the artsd which plays the sound over it's own connection to the card.

If you use KDE on RedHat, then you have the very same problem. There are only two possible reasons why it behaves other way:

1. You have an EMU10K1 based soundcard there (Soundblaster 512, Live!, Audigy)

2. The artsd sound daemon is configured that way, that it releases the sound card after some (perhaps some very few) seconds. You can do that under SuSE, too in KDE control center.

Now clear? ;)

Hi - thanks for the answer. On the risk of being banned forever from this list (or worse: being ignored) some more ramblings. I don't exactly know what soundcard my PC on work (the redhat one) has: I know that it is an onboard Intel sound and artsshell status gives oss as the audio method. I don't know how to find the details under redhat (didn't find lsmod or something similar) but I also didn't put too much time into it, since I'm supposed to work at my work PC ;-). On work the server suspends after 15 seconds. I get my system notification immediately also when some other application is using the soundcard, so I guess everthing is channeled through artsd or whatever the sound-configuration has as the output. On my home PC (alsa (snd-via686,snd-via8233) driver for a VIA onboard sound card and an AMD64 motherboard, which I always thought was not one of the cards you mention above) suspend is set to 5 seconds. I did some testing: Case A: external player not used: No sound even when the artsd sound server is suspended Case B: external player set to artsplay: Notification always works immediately, even when I start realplay and let it run my favorite radio station, i.e constantly playing sound. While realplay is running artsshell gives sound server suspended as expected. But now the surprise at least for me: Notification still works, artsshell gives soundserver running, suspending in xx seconds after the notification. From that I would conclude that I somehow managed -unknowingly- to configure the sound system for more than one application. I did have to compile the alsa drivers myself to get the sound running, but I blindly followed the instructions, maybe there the answer lies. I dimly remember that under SuSE 8.2 (on an other system) I got all notifications that came up during running another legacy application at once after stopping the application (which is also understandable, I guess the notification are simply put into a buffer and artsd grabs the sound device as soon as it is available and plays the buffered sounds). Maybe I don't understand the 'external player' in sound notifications of the control center correctly. I thought that anything except artsplay is meant by external. But maybe anything except some default set by the sound-system is meant by external. Or I don't understand artsplay: I thought it always goes through artsd. So I'm still mildly confused, but since everything is working even better than expected this is no problem (keeps me from thinking I know everything) Thanks for the patience and reading through my ramblings gl

On Monday 09 August 2004 19:34, Daniel Eckl wrote:

- The external player can be "artsplay", too, which connects to the local running artsd. This daemon get's the play request and open's the sound device again and plays sound. This is possible, but should give the very same effect than not using an external player itself: Sound playing through artsd.

So I'm a bit puzled what could be the reason for your problem. If artsplay plays good as external player, then the sound should work without expernal player configuration, too, because it uses artsd directly.

So you can check if your artsd, which is running in suspend mode, gets blocked by another application using the soundcard.

Hi - that's what I thought ,too. As an additional remark: The 'test sound' button in the control center sound system module always works with external player on or off. I did run several things at once: First I started realplay. Then I switched off the auto-suspend feature for artsd and let artsplay play some longer .ogg file. After that I started 'play' with the .ogg file. Result: I hear the radio (realplay), the first .ogg file (artsplay) and the second .ogg file (play) simultaneously. /data/downloads/firefox-installer # lsof -nP |grep "pcm\|dsp\|dmix\|snd" gives kdeinit 7550 gunterl 15u CHR 116,0 15635 /dev/snd/controlC0 realplay 8720 gunterl 10w CHR 14,3 4533 /dev/dsp0 artsd 9001 gunterl mem CHR 116,16 15740 /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p artsd 9001 gunterl mem CHR 116,24 15739 /dev/snd/pcmC0D0c artsd 9001 gunterl 10u CHR 116,16 15740 /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p artsd 9001 gunterl 11u CHR 116,24 15739 /dev/snd/pcmC0D0c sox 9028 gunterl 4w CHR 14,3 4533 /dev/dsp0 'play' did not work simultaneously with realplay when I tried to play a '.wav' file (message: 'sox: Unable to sync dsp'), artsplay however did play .wav files simulataneously with realplay. The mixer info gives /data/downloads/firefox-installer # amixer info Card default 'rev60'/'VIA 823x rev60 at 0x2c00, irq 22' Mixer name : 'SigmaTel STAC9758/59' Components : 'AC97a' Controls : 52 Simple ctrls : 35 I don't have nearly enough knowledge to understand how Linux exactly connects to the soundcard but maybe these outputs are useful for you or someone else. For me it is not a problem that I have to set artsplay as external player for notifications and the current behaviour is what I want: Hear my favorite radio station and also hear system notifications at the same time. If all this is interesting for other people, I could try to locate the exact reason for my system behaviour, but for that someone would have to give me some guidelines (if the above info is not enough). BTW: CPU is AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Motherboard is d1607 from Fujitsu-Siemens (VIA K8T800/VT8237 Southbridge) SuSE version is 9.1 Pro 64bit Cheers gl