Arch Linux

Locri

Member

From: Ontario, Canada

Registered: 2005-02-22

Posts: 55

[Solved] OSS4 KDE Notifications problem

After reading a lot of great stuff about OSS4, I decided to give it a shot.  I installed it and parts of it seem to work just fine, but I noticed that a lot of my KDE sounds weren't working.  To make a long story short, for some reason OSS4 doesn't seem to be able to play Ogg Vorbis files on my system.  Is this a problem with OSS4 or is there maybe something else I should be looking at?  I have an extremely fresh install of Arch so I'm not sure what the issue could be if it's mine.

Thanks!

Last edited by Locri (2008-05-18 14:13:29)

skymt

Member

Registered: 2006-11-27

Posts: 443

Re: [Solved] OSS4 KDE Notifications problem

The sound system (OSS or ALSA) doesn't care what codecs you use. It's the job of whatever program is playing the sound to take the file and convert it into a form the sound system can output. If a program can play Ogg files with ALSA but not with OSS, that's a bug in that program.

Gullible Jones

Member

Registered: 2004-12-29

Posts: 4,863

Re: [Solved] OSS4 KDE Notifications problem

Try installing libogg and libvorbis.

Locri

Member

From: Ontario, Canada

Registered: 2005-02-22

Posts: 55

Re: [Solved] OSS4 KDE Notifications problem

The problem, more specificially, is that so far using ossplay to play System Notifications for KDE it will play .wav files just fine but not .ogg

I tried installing libogg and libvorbis and that didn't help unfortunately.  Any other ideas?

(Oh, and a side question.. when using OSS do I need all of the 'snd' modules that are also in the Modules section or should I disable the loading for them like soundcore?)

Last edited by Locri (2008-05-17 21:41:01)

skymt

Member

Registered: 2006-11-27

Posts: 443

Re: [Solved] OSS4 KDE Notifications problem

Ah, the problem becomes clear. ossplay does not play ogg files. It was never designed to, it's just a simple demo app. I suggest using play, from the sox package.

Locri

Member

From: Ontario, Canada

Registered: 2005-02-22

Posts: 55

Re: [Solved] OSS4 KDE Notifications problem

Ahh, thank you.  I didn't bother trying aplay since I rather expected it wouldn't work and couldn't find play.  I'll test that soon ^_^

Locri

Member

From: Ontario, Canada

Registered: 2005-02-22

Posts: 55

Re: [Solved] OSS4 KDE Notifications problem

Installed Sox, switched the notifications to use Play and now I get even -less- sound than before.  Play won't even play .wav files.  Any other ideas?  At this point I'm probably just going to scrap OSS and go back to ALSA... it might not have as good of quality, but at least it works.

Edit:  Experimenting around more... I installed Amarok and have played various MP3s and OGGs and so far it's working beautifully with OSS, so it must be something with the external players I'm trying to use to replace arts for Notifications.  I've tried aplay, play, and ossplay so far... any other suggestions?

Last edited by Locri (2008-05-18 03:16:33)

Dheart

Member

From: Sofia, Bulgaria

Registered: 2006-10-26

Posts: 956

Re: [Solved] OSS4 KDE Notifications problem

A workaround is to convert those ogg files to wav and play them with ossplay...

---

My victim you are meant to be
No, you cannot hide nor flee
You know what I'm looking for
Pleasure your torture, I will endure...

Locri

Member

From: Ontario, Canada

Registered: 2005-02-22

Posts: 55

Re: [Solved] OSS4 KDE Notifications problem

Another update, wine works fine too, so I figured I'd look directly at 'play'

Running play from the commandline gives me a good hint at what's going on:

ALSA lib confmisc.c:768:(parse_card) cannot find card '0'
ALSA lib conf.c:3513:(_snd_config_evaluate) function snd_func_card_driver returned error: No such file or directory
ALSA lib confmisc.c:392:(snd_func_concat) error evaluating strings
ALSA lib conf.c:3513:(_snd_config_evaluate) function snd_func_concat returned error: No such file or directory
ALSA lib confmisc.c:1251:(snd_func_refer) error evaluating name
ALSA lib conf.c:3513:(_snd_config_evaluate) function snd_func_refer returned error: No such file or directory
ALSA lib conf.c:3985:(snd_config_expand) Evaluate error: No such file or directory
ALSA lib pcm.c:2144:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM default
ALSA snd_pcm_open error: No such file or directory
play ao: Could not open default device: error 5
play soxio: Failed writing `default':

So it looks like 'play' is trying to use ALSA rather than OSS.  I've been looking around for configuration options of some sort, but nothing seems to be coming up.  Could the package in the repositories possibly have been built without OSS support?  Or is there possibly something else I'm missing?

Thanks again for the help.

Edit:  Ok, I've made a custom compiled SOX package that definitely compiled OSS support and it's still doing the same thing >_<

Last edited by Locri (2008-05-18 13:19:45)

lucke

Member

From: Poland

Registered: 2004-11-30

Posts: 4,018

Re: [Solved] OSS4 KDE Notifications problem

You can use mplayer.

Locri

Member

From: Ontario, Canada

Registered: 2005-02-22

Posts: 55

Re: [Solved] OSS4 KDE Notifications problem

Thanks, mplayer does the trick.  Admittedly I'd still like to know why SOX doesn't work with OSS properly, but I can play with that at a later date.

axel

Member

Registered: 2007-12-10

Posts: 77

Re: [Solved] OSS4 KDE Notifications problem

The problem with the system notifications not playing with play as external player is because of the sox version of arch. sox package is outdated (and without any maintaner). If you take the PKGBUILD from abs and install the latest stable sox 14.0.1 you will be fine.