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#1 2006-02-14 14:18:38

desertViking
Member
From: Arizona
Registered: 2005-10-30
Posts: 170

Sound system needs to be restarted occasionally

Hi,

Can anyone offer an idea as to why my sound system needs to be restarted occasionally?

I've run alsaconf, saved the configuration, removed the oss compatibility drivers from modprobe, and am currently using KDE as my desktop manager.

Upon starting KDE, the sound works ok.  System sounds, amarok, firefox, etc.

After some period of time measured in hours, the sound system will stop.  For example, I went to bed last night and everything was fine, but this morning the sound system has stopped again.

To restart the sound system, I have tried using the KDE sound system manager.  It fails initialization and says it will continue to use the null device.

Exiting KDE and running "arts restart" from rc.d will restart the sound system.  Starting KDE at this point and it's good again.

This has been going on for a couple of weeks now, I guess.

Thx in advance for advice you can share!


"In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is."

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#2 2006-02-15 13:42:09

desertViking
Member
From: Arizona
Registered: 2005-10-30
Posts: 170

Re: Sound system needs to be restarted occasionally

Another morning, and the sound system needs to be restarted again :-<  Could this be KDE?

It's also been awhile since I've restarted the whole system.  "top" shows about a month.  Is it possible that a few to many things, perhaps udev or kernel, have been updated in the meantime?

This is a minor annoyance to be sure.  Just trying to learn from it.

Thx in advance!


"In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is."

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#3 2006-02-15 18:59:31

jaboua
Member
Registered: 2005-11-05
Posts: 634

Re: Sound system needs to be restarted occasionally

Can apps using ALSA directly play sounds while arts is playing naughty? In that case, it might be worth a shot replacing aRts with pure alsa + dmix + "play" for system notifications... Also you may try switching on/off arts realtime priority and see if it changes anything.

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#4 2006-02-15 19:20:18

desertViking
Member
From: Arizona
Registered: 2005-10-30
Posts: 170

Re: Sound system needs to be restarted occasionally

Good advice, I'll try a couple of those suggestions.  I'll let you know what I learn.  Thx!


"In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is."

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#5 2006-02-15 23:28:47

iphitus
Forum Fellow
From: Melbourne, Australia
Registered: 2004-10-09
Posts: 4,927

Re: Sound system needs to be restarted occasionally

if you are looking to do a alsa/dmix based setup, take a look at the wiki, theres a few very good articles there that will be of use.

iphitus

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#6 2006-02-16 04:04:54

desertViking
Member
From: Arizona
Registered: 2005-10-30
Posts: 170

Re: Sound system needs to be restarted occasionally

I'm really not doing anything fancy.  Just running normal sound applications and events from KDE.  I have "autodetect" selected. 

On this advice, I'll try just selecting alsa.  I've restarted the system and we'll see what happens in the morning.

Thx for chiming in  smile


"In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is."

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#7 2006-02-16 14:41:20

jaboua
Member
Registered: 2005-11-05
Posts: 634

Re: Sound system needs to be restarted occasionally

desertViking wrote:

I'm really not doing anything fancy.  Just running normal sound applications and events from KDE.  I have "autodetect" selected. 

On this advice, I'll try just selecting alsa.  I've restarted the system and we'll see what happens in the morning.

Thx for chiming in  smile

"autodetect" would probably make arts use ALSA anyway, either over OSS emulation or plain ALSA.

What I meant was getting rid of arts. Disable the KDE sound system in kcontrol -> sound & multimedia -> sound system -> "Enable the sound system". Then "pacman -S sox" (if it ain't allready installed. go to kcontrol -> sound & multimedia -> system notifications -> player settings (down in the right corner) -> Use an external player. In the textbox below, just enter "play". Make all sound apps like xmms, amarok, etc. NOT use arts, switch output plugin to alsa or xine or gstreamer or... Then setup dmix. From the wiki:

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/All … ing_system.

Myself I haven't tried that guide, I just used the directions from http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php?page=DmixPlugin (point 3).

Restart KDE, and arts should be gone. Works fine here. In addition, it seems faster and arts could IIRC use some system resources from time to time + I've seen it crash from time to time (even when I'm not playing any sounds), so this might be the problem here too...

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#8 2006-02-16 15:30:46

desertViking
Member
From: Arizona
Registered: 2005-10-30
Posts: 170

Re: Sound system needs to be restarted occasionally

Interesting.  I'll have to try that.

By the way, this is the output from trying to restart the sound system within KDE this morning (again, events and other media playback were halted):

device: default can't be opened for playback (Device or resource busy) Exiting KDE, restarting arts, and restarting KDE and all's good again.

Thx for your reply!


"In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is."

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#9 2006-02-16 16:46:20

jaboua
Member
Registered: 2005-11-05
Posts: 634

Re: Sound system needs to be restarted occasionally

When that happened - have you been running any multimedia apps as root? Try putting in dmix even if you're staying with arts - it might work in your scenario (I've experienced similar stuff before with arts taking full control over the sound system, so that games and similar using just ALSA won't be able to use the sound device -> something like the error you wrote)

Still, I reccomand you to try running without aRts as well 8)

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