Arch Linux

nubity

Member

Registered: 2009-11-29

Posts: 46

My sound is working really (erratically) strangely.

I dual boot sometimes to play some games.

A while back, I recently wiped all my config files in Archlinux due to a silly mishap doing some yaourt cleanup. I ended up reconfigging them, and from that day onwards my sound has been acting real weird.

These are the symptoms:

1) When I reboot back from Windows, my sound hardware (most of the times) are not detected and KDE will ask me if I wanna forget them. I have to do an alsaconf and reboot to get it working again.

2) Even if there is sound, there are times when sound is only restricted to only 1 app. That is to say if I have mplayer running, amarok can't play any sound, nor chromium, etc. A reboot might help, or closing that sound program and restarting kmix might help, but this problem is really erratic and I can't find a sustainable fix for it.

3) Recently, my mplayer stutters like mad. I suspect it has to do with the sound as well. VLC plays fine. Mplayer used to work fine all along until recently (can't recall anything that triggered it)

To try to fix all these, this is what I've done:

1) added alsa to daemons in rc.conf
2) did an alsaconf, then alsactl store.
3) added options snd-pcsp index=2 in /etc/modprobe.d/modprobe.conf
4) reinstalled alsa-utils and alsa

--

Apart from these issues, my tv card can't work properly as well. If I add option cx88xx tuner=38 in my modprobe.conf, my logs get spammed and end up filling up my / partition (thread here: http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=88673 )

--

Archlinus is a fabulous distro but I need my sound resolved  Can anyone help me out here?

Oh, I realised that syslog-ng is still spamming the logs and filling up the hdd even without that line.

egan

Member

From: Mountain View, CA

Registered: 2009-08-17

Posts: 273

Re: My sound is working really (erratically) strangely.

You cannot play multiple sounds at once with plain alsa. You would need to install a mixer like Pulseaudio (uggh). But is there really a need to do this?

---

GitHub

hampusw

Member

From: Sweden

Registered: 2010-01-22

Posts: 3

Re: My sound is working really (erratically) strangely.

You can play multiple sounds with pure ALSA. See http://alsa.opensrc.org/DmixPlugin. If the sound card doesn't support hardware mixing, software mixing is enabled by default.

Did you actually try without any alsa configuration at all? What happened? I usually let it autodetect everything for me. That won't work well if you don't want to use the default card or similar, of course.

I run Xfce myself, so I don't know about anything KDE specific...

brebs

Member

Registered: 2007-04-03

Posts: 3,742

Re: My sound is working really (erratically) strangely.

there are times when sound is only restricted to only 1 app.

This is a depressingly common source of confusion.

ALSA's emulation of OSS bypasses dmix. That's the problem. The solution is to stop using OSS. See what's using the sound devices:

fuser -v /dev/snd/* /dev/dsp*

/dev/dsp* is OSS - you need to change the configuration of any apps using OSS, so that they use ALSA.