On Sun, 22 May 2005 21:02:12 +0200, you wrote:

On Sunday 22 May 2005 20:41, John Bailo wrote:

...

Someone told me that Arts is the cause of a lot of sound problems in Suse.

Someone told you a half truth.

...

What is it?

It is the KDE sound daemon. It is responsible for managing sound streams and multiplexing them together. The problem some people have with it is that it tends to hog the sound device. If you have a really old or cheap card that can't handle multiple threads, it will tend to block non-arts aware programs from producing sound. This is the only problem I'm aware of, and if you have a reasonably new card it shouldn't be a problem at all

...

Can it be disabled and yet have the OS produce sound?

The OS doesn't produce sounds. KDE will not be able to produce sounds anymore, but other programs will still work. But this is an extremely unlikely source of your sound problems

I tend to disagree with Anders (on this), but it's a complex question and at least part of the issue is what versions of arts and KDE you're using, as well as your sound card & driver. In SuSE 9.2 I had tons of erratic sound problems with several different sound cards. Sometimes stopping and/or restarting artsd helped, sometimes it didn't - I suspect I was having several different kinds of problems, but after beating it up for a while I just gave up on audio in linux, so I can't really tell you exactly what the problems were. With 9.3, the sound is rock solid on the same hardware, so YMMV. If your audio is iffy, try stopping and/or restarting artsd and see what happens. You won't break anything and it might help. Mike- -- Mornings: Evolution in action. Only the grumpy will survive. -- Please note - Due to the intense volume of spam, we have installed site-wide spam filters at catherders.com. If email from you bounces, try non-HTML, non-encoded, non-attachments.

On 5/22/05, Anders Johansson wrote:

On Sunday 22 May 2005 20:41, John Bailo wrote:

...

Someone told me that Arts is the cause of a lot of sound problems in Suse.

Someone told you a half truth.

...

What is it?

It is the KDE sound daemon. It is responsible for managing sound streams and multiplexing them together. The problem some people have with it is that it tends to hog the sound device. If you have a really old or cheap card that can't handle multiple threads, it will tend to block non-arts aware programs from producing sound. This is the only problem I'm aware of, and if you have a reasonably new card it shouldn't be a problem at all

...

Can it be disabled and yet have the OS produce sound?

The OS doesn't produce sounds. KDE will not be able to produce sounds anymore, but other programs will still work. But this is an extremely unlikely source of your sound problems

What do you mean by "KDE will not be able to produce sounds anymore"? Will amarok and other music programs still work? I have all system sounds turned off. So, disabling arts may be exactly what I want. Dotan Cohen http://LyricsList.com/ http://Music-Liriks.com/

On Sunday 29 May 2005 17:07, Dotan Cohen wrote:

On 5/22/05, Anders Johansson wrote:

...

On Sunday 22 May 2005 20:41, John Bailo wrote:

...

Someone told me that Arts is the cause of a lot of sound problems in Suse.

Someone told you a half truth.

...

What is it?

It is the KDE sound daemon. It is responsible for managing sound streams and multiplexing them together. The problem some people have with it is that it tends to hog the sound device. If you have a really old or cheap card that can't handle multiple threads, it will tend to block non-arts aware programs from producing sound. This is the only problem I'm aware of, and if you have a reasonably new card it shouldn't be a problem at all

...

Can it be disabled and yet have the OS produce sound?

The OS doesn't produce sounds. KDE will not be able to produce sounds anymore, but other programs will still work. But this is an extremely unlikely source of your sound problems

What do you mean by "KDE will not be able to produce sounds anymore"?

What I said. The core KDE stuff (making noises when you open windows etc) is done through artsd. If you disable artsd, KDE won't be able to make those noises.

Will amarok and other music programs still work? I have all system sounds turned off. So, disabling arts may be exactly what I want.

Any program that is capable of producing sound through other means than artsd will still be able to do that of course. noatun will not, it is highly dependent on artsd. amarok can be configured to use other things, so that will still work. Non-KDE programs will not be affected

John, On Sunday 29 May 2005 10:52, John Bailo wrote:

On Sunday 29 May 2005 08:25, Anders Johansson wrote:

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What I said. The core KDE stuff (making noises when you open windows etc) is done through artsd. If you disable artsd, KDE won't be able to make those noises.

Well, I think I could live w/o that!

Well, even though most of those action sounds are utterly inane to me, keep in mind it includes KMail's notification sounds, the terminal beep in Konsole and probably some other sounds emitted by KDE apps you probably don't want squelched.

...

As they said in the Bauhaus: less is more...

Words to live by. Randall Schulz

Andreas Philipp wrote:

El Dom 29 May 2005 16:10, Randall R Schulz escribió:

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Well, even though most of those action sounds are utterly inane to me, keep in mind it includes KMail's notification sounds, the terminal beep in Konsole and probably some other sounds emitted by KDE apps you probably don't want squelched.

If I had KMail beep on me every time I receive a message on this and other high traffic lists, I would go insane.

Ever worked in an office, where a few of your co-workers insisted on having event sounds enabled? :-|

On Sunday 29 May 2005 22:44, Randall R Schulz wrote:

Andreas,

On Sunday 29 May 2005 14:32, Andreas Philipp wrote:

...

El Dom 29 May 2005 16:10, Randall R Schulz escribió:

...

Well, even though most of those action sounds are utterly inane to me, keep in mind it includes KMail's notification sounds, the terminal beep in Konsole and probably some other sounds emitted by KDE apps you probably don't want squelched.

If I had KMail beep on me every time I receive a message on this and other high traffic lists, I would go insane.

Of course. Getting a sound on every mail transfer that retrieves one or more messages would be excessive for many of us.

But there are some mailboxes / lists / senders from whom I do want to be notified, and I've enabled sound actions and distinctive sounds with the filters that handle to those few classes of messages. Alternatively, install festival and set up a filter to "tell" you who the mail is from: echo "new mail from mum" | festival --tts

Regards, A.

On Monday 30 May 2005 00:03, Scott Leighton wrote:

On Sunday 29 May 2005 3:21 pm, Andrew Beames wrote:

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Alternatively, install festival and set up a filter to "tell" you who the mail is from: echo "new mail from mum" | festival --tts

That is slick!

The RPM didn't install any man pages and /usr/share/doc/packages/festival seems to have only cryptic example files in it. Any idea where the documentation is?

Scott You'll find /usr/share/doc/packages/festival/INSTALL has a bit of info in the "Checking an installation" section. I did try to do more - I wanted to use a British voice - but I couldn't understand the docs I downloaded. Terminology was all gobbledeygook.

A

Andrew, On Sunday 29 May 2005 15:21, Andrew Beames wrote:

On Sunday 29 May 2005 22:44, Randall R Schulz wrote:

...

Andreas,

On Sunday 29 May 2005 14:32, Andreas Philipp wrote:

...

El Dom 29 May 2005 16:10, Randall R Schulz escribió:

...

Well, even though most of those action sounds are utterly inane to me, keep in mind it includes KMail's notification sounds, the terminal beep in Konsole and probably some other sounds emitted by KDE apps you probably don't want squelched.

If I had KMail beep on me every time I receive a message on this and other high traffic lists, I would go insane.

Of course. Getting a sound on every mail transfer that retrieves one or more messages would be excessive for many of us.

But there are some mailboxes / lists / senders from whom I do want to be notified, and I've enabled sound actions and distinctive sounds with the filters that handle to those few classes of messages.

Alternatively, install festival and set up a filter to "tell" you who the mail is from: echo "new mail from mum" | festival --tts

No ... THANK ... _*YOU*_!!! Gag. I can't stand the stupid elevator at work that tells me it's "going up" and "going down" and "third floor" and all that nonsense. There's precious little for which vocal output from a computer is to my taste. Gag. By the way, I gave it a try. It's one of the poorer implementations of algorithmic text-to-speech I've heard. And lastly, I think that sound is an underused form of information output, but speech? No way. It needs much technical improvement before it's even an option, and even then, there just isn't much for which it's better than textual output.

Regards,

A.

Randall Schulz

Andrew, On Monday 30 May 2005 01:01, Andrew Beames wrote:

On Monday 30 May 2005 01:07, Randall R Schulz wrote:

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Andrew,

...

Alternatively, install festival and set up a filter to "tell" you who the mail is from: echo "new mail from mum" | festival --tts

No ... THANK ... _*YOU*_!!!

...

By the way, I gave it a try. It's one of the poorer implementations of algorithmic text-to-speech I've heard.

...

Randall Schulz

I agree the quality of the simple script I have is dubious. But its task is to notify me of emails from certain customers that require immediate attention - especially when I am working at another desk. And for that it is the perfect tool.

I have the same need, and I associate recognizable sounds with those email filters. I suppose if you had more than a few of these, it would be hard to come up with a meaningful and distinguishable set of sounds, but do you really need an audible indication of precisely which high-priority person sent you mail? You're just going to bring up the KMail main window and visually scan for the high-priority mailboxe(s) that have one or more unread messages, so you don't really need a distinctive sound for each one.

A.

Randall Schulz

Charles, On Sunday 29 May 2005 15:23, Charles philip Chan wrote:

On 29 May 2005, rschulz@sonic.net wrote:

...

Well, even though most of those action sounds are utterly inane to me, keep in mind it includes KMail's notification sounds, the terminal beep in Konsole and probably some other sounds emitted by KDE apps you probably don't want squelched.

One can configure KDE to use an external program for notifications. Go to kcontrol -> "Sound & Multimedia" -> "System Notifications" -> "Player Settings" -> "Use an external player". Since the KDE system sounds are now in Ogg Vorbis format, "play" and "aplay" wound not work- I personal use "musicus" (http://muth.org/Robert/Musicus/).

Why? Why have a separate process get launched for each little notification sound?

Charles

Randall Schulz

Charles, On Sunday 29 May 2005 16:21, Charles philip Chan wrote:

On 29 May 2005, rschulz@sonic.net wrote:

...

Why? Why have a separate process get launched for each little notification sound?

These processes are really light weight, as opposed to the CPU intensive artsd. I don't really use KDE any way, I just use a few KDE apps. Also, I have a multi-channelled sound card, and I do not want a sound server hogging my sound device, even with auto-suspend.

That doesn't make much sense. The ARTS daemon runs continuously, and so does not incur nearly the per-invocation cost of an outboard process. Furthermore, there's only so much to do when it comes to playing sound. You enqueue the samples it to the hardware. There's a bit of kernel processing and some DMA. There's not much to it, assuming the sampling rate and format are directly supported by the hardware.

Charles

Randall Schulz

Charles, On Sunday 29 May 2005 18:24, Charles philip Chan wrote:

On 29 May 2005, rschulz@sonic.net wrote:

...

That doesn't make much sense. The ARTS daemon runs continuously, and so does not incur nearly the per-invocation cost of an outboard process.

Artd has been known to be a cpu hog for years:

http://www.google.com/search?q=artsd+cpu&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

Those hits all appear to describe malfunctions. I've never seen any such problems.

Charles

Randall Schulz

Charles, On Sunday 29 May 2005 19:21, Charles philip Chan wrote:

On 29 May 2005, rschulz@sonic.net wrote:

...

Those hits all appear to describe malfunctions. I've never seen any such problems.

Well, artsd taken up 1.7- 2.4% of cpu on my 2.4 GHz P4 system while playing an Vorbis file as oppose to 0.3% for musicus (same with xmms). It also takes up 0.7%- 1.4% when idle. Imagine what this will be like on a slower system. This point will be moot anyway once system notification support akode.

I've been logged in for 4 1/2 days and the artsd that was started when I logged in has accumulated only 112 seconds of CPU time. I've monitored it in top and it never bumps the CPU % column above zero when it is idle. Over the same period of time, my GKrellm has consumed almost 414 minutes of CPU time. My CPU is a 3.0 GHz HT Pentium 4. I don't know why some people have these problems with ARTS, but clearly they are not universal.

This thread is getting out of hand.

My god, if you think this is "out of hand," you don't belong in on-line discussions. So far it has been entirely on-topic and calm.c

I was just pointing out in my original post that it is possible to use an external program for system notification and not about the merits or lack there of with artsd.

That's fine. And I asked why one would want to do such a thing. I still see no point to doing so when the native KDE sound support seems to work quite well. Perhaps for people with problematic hardware there is a better choice, but it is not so for me or, I think, in general.

Charles

Randall Schulz