ESD bug

YscO · 2007-05-17 16:06:33

Well after the last upgrade off ESD alsa doesn't work correctly. When I play with sonata i get the following error:

ALSA lib pcm_dmix.c:864:(snd_pcm_dmix_open) unable to open slave

I killed the ESD process and alsa (Sonata) works again , how can I fix this problem?

Last edited by YscO (2007-05-17 16:07:10)

mrunion · 2007-05-17 17:11:27

Apparently, you can't (read last comments and work backwards if you want) :

http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/6544

I am much appreciative of all the work the Linux Devs do, but telling me to buy a decent sound card may need a bit more follow up. For example, I have a DV8000 laptop -- can you suggest some decent PCMCIA or USB sound cards? I'm not b*tching here, mind you, I just want to know what "decent" is and what others are doing. Apparently something in dmix isn't playing well with others at this time, so hopefully that will be fixed.

As for now, bye bye ESD.

(Oh, and it was my understanding that most sound cards not DON'T do hardware mixing no matter how decent -- or expensive -- they are.)

YscO · 2007-05-17 17:21:25

Lolz, I think a nForce2 MCP2-T is a decent soundcard

Thanks for the url.

shining · 2007-05-17 17:51:52

My two sound blaster card (live and audigy 2) do hardware mixing, the audigy 2 is already a few years old, and the live even more, and they weren't really expensive even then.
So that's what I would call decent cards.
If you have a laptop, then you just have to deal with the crappy integrated audio chipset

As an alternative, use decent softwares that support alsa correctly, and remove that esd crap

dmartins · 2007-05-17 18:39:08

You may want to have a look at PulseAudio (http://pulseaudio.org/). I've heard it's set to replace esd. I haven't tried it but it's available through the community repo.

YscO · 2007-05-17 18:40:52

Just for the archives

Follow the link for a better description of the problem.

Solution that works for me with gnome (I use alsa):
Go to >> Preferences >> sound >> [TAB] Sounds >> disable software sound mixing using ESD

Last edited by YscO (2007-05-17 18:41:19)

mrunion · 2007-05-17 19:43:01

Just curious, how would one run audacity under Alsa? alsa-oss? Am I confusing things here? Does the following statements hold true or false:

ESD != OSS
ESD != ALSA
ALSA != OSS <-- (and I have ALSA and OSS choices in my sound stuff. Should one be "removed"? Is OSS a kernel thing that requires me blacklisting MODs?)

mrunion · 2007-05-17 19:51:59

Oh, and another question. Suppose I want to dump ESD. I don't have it running in the rc.conf or anything, but a "pacman -R esd" shows that it has the following dependencies:

arts
libao
libgnome
musepack-tools
xnine-lib
xmms

Can I just leave ESD out of rc.conf and that be "good enough" for making it unused on my system, or should I dump xmms, xine and such.

Has anyone tried pulseaudio and do they like it?

YscO · 2007-05-17 20:05:33

Don't place it in rc.conf and it should be enough, but some graphical desktop environments (for example Gnome) load esd on startup.

Can't help you with the other questions

Last edited by YscO (2007-05-17 20:06:29)

shining · 2007-05-17 21:19:22

mrunion wrote:

Just curious, how would one run audacity under Alsa? alsa-oss? Am I confusing things here? Does the following statements hold true or false:
ESD != OSS
ESD != ALSA
ALSA != OSS <-- (and I have ALSA and OSS choices in my sound stuff. Should one be "removed"? Is OSS a kernel thing that requires me blacklisting MODs?)

alsa and oss are the two sound systems available in the kernel. oss is deprecated though, and has been replaced by alsa.
It's still available in the kernel (afaik, because of some regressions with some alsa drivers), but arch kernel has it disabled, so you only have alsa modules available by default in arch.
For compatibility with apps still using oss, alsa provides oss emulation.
That's the case of last stable version of audacity, which only supports oss. However, he 1.3 beta version has alsa support, but I don't know how good that is.
Then sound servers come at a higher level, between applications and either oss or alsa, so that causes overheads and additional latencies, as well as an additional place where things can go wrong

Briquet · 2007-05-18 03:56:00

I solved this by downgrading the ESD package

JGC · 2007-05-18 06:13:18

The point here is that ESD hangs completely when using alsa on many systems. Something happens inside alsa, esd gets confused and locks up the client. No fun here.
So I disabled alsa support in esd completely. Then we have the next problem: alsa dmix doesnt work with OSS emulation it seems...

So, it's one of these options:
- buy a decent soundcard that doesn't need dmix
- Don't use esound
- pipe everything through esound

Option 1 is what I did 3 years ago, option 2 is what's standard and option 3 is the way things worked when dmix didn't exist.

mrunion · 2007-05-18 15:00:33

@shining:

In my System -> Preferences -> Sound (in Gnome) I have both ALSA and OSS showing up in my drop-down lists. Should OSS be gone? I leave the thing on "Autodetect" and I do have sound from apps. the only thing I don't get is "System Sounds" -- the dings and tinkles that occur when you're clicking things. This is because enabling ESD causes problems and you can't have System Sounds without ESD (right?).

Audacity also has selections for OSS and ALSA, though selecting the ALSA settings DOESN'T work. I have to use OSS in Audacity.

Here is a screenshot of what I'm talking about:

http://www.bigpony.com/linuxscreenshots … rences.png

Is my system screwed up, do I need to find a way to disable OSS (as in, never see it in any lists)? If so, I guess Audacity is gone until the beta is released. Do I need alsa-oss installed?

Thanks for the answers!

shining · 2007-05-18 15:28:26

mrunion wrote:

@shining:
In my System -> Preferences -> Sound (in Gnome) I have both ALSA and OSS showing up in my drop-down lists. Should OSS be gone? I leave the thing on "Autodetect" and I do have sound from apps. the only thing I don't get is "System Sounds" -- the dings and tinkles that occur when you're clicking things. This is because enabling ESD causes problems and you can't have System Sounds without ESD (right?).

Even if you're using alsa, it doesn't mean oss is not available, because of oss emulation in alsa.
Besides, I don't know about this particular case, but I think that at least sometimes, applications don't try to detect which is available, oss or alsa, they just list all sound systems they support and let the choice up to you.
So in any cases, it shouldn't matter that oss is there.
I guess that for this gnome settings, autodetect should be fine, but you could try choosing alsa explicitly.

I don't know about system sounds in gnome, and system sounds annoy me anyway
I only know that in kde, if you only disable their sound server (arts), system sounds will stop working. But you can specify a command for playing system sounds, and so you can use a little command line sound player supporting alsa there.
I'm not sure if gnome allows the same.

Audacity also has selections for OSS and ALSA, though selecting the ALSA settings DOESN'T work. I have to use OSS in Audacity.

I see that archlinux already has the beta 1.3 version of audacity.
See here : http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ -> last stable is 1.2.6 and last beta is 1.3.3
Though arch only has 1.3.2 ( http://archlinux.org/packages/search/?q=audacity ), but that should still work with alsa.

mrunion · 2007-05-18 16:37:34

OK, thanks shining.

I do have 1.3.2 of Audacity installed, but when selecting anything except OSS ("Playback: OSS (/dev/dsp)" in the preferences of Audacity) I get no sound. Again, I don't have alsa-oss installed. Could that be the problem? Just curious. I'm OK as is.

Thanks again for all the help.

shining · 2007-05-18 17:37:40

mrunion wrote:

I do have 1.3.2 of Audacity installed, but when selecting anything except OSS ("Playback: OSS (/dev/dsp)" in the preferences of Audacity) I get no sound. Again, I don't have alsa-oss installed. Could that be the problem? Just curious. I'm OK as is.

I don't understand what that alsa-oss is :
current/alsa-oss 1.0.12-1
OSS compatibility library

I thought oss didn't have a library model, and only provided the /dev/dsp device, that the applications use.
Using the oss emulation of alsa, you just need to have the snd-{seq,pcm,mixer}-oss modules loaded, which should give you the /dev/dsp device, and that should be enough.
So I'm not sure what that alsa-oss lib is, but I'm nearly sure it isn't needed for using oss.
In any cases, it's certainly not needed for using alsa directly

HighD · 2007-05-29 03:58:18

YscO wrote:

Solution that works for me with gnome (I use alsa):
Go to >> Preferences >> sound >> [TAB] Sounds >> disable software sound mixing using ESD

Using this fix for now

Last edited by HighD (2007-05-29 03:58:43)

mrunion · 2007-05-29 15:43:08

Well, the latest upgrade of the Kernel and alsa stuff seemed to have fixed the lockups. I can hear sound now when enabling system sounds AND not get lockups. I just have to STOP esd before getting sound out of VLC (and probably some other stuff -- haven't tested all that yet).

Thanks guys!

Last edited by mrunion (2007-05-29 15:43:26)

nesl247 · 2007-06-12 03:10:27

Guys, build esd with --enable-alsa instead of the default --disable-alsa that is in the PKGBUILD, and then you can use esd and play music and such.

See: http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/7424

iphitus · 2007-06-12 09:30:55

nesl247 wrote:

Guys, build esd with --enable-alsa instead of the default --disable-alsa that is in the PKGBUILD, and then you can use esd and play music and such.
See: http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/7424

it's always been built with alsa, I don't know why it was changed. but thanks for pointing it out, explains why my esd aint been working.

James

mrunion · 2007-06-15 14:24:25

Does one just "download" the source for esound (esd) and compile it? Do we blacklist esd after that? Just some quick pointers would be helpful.

nesl247 · 2007-06-15 16:06:08

Do this: cd /var/abs/daemons/esd && sed -i 's/--disable-alsa/--enable-alsa/' PKGBUILD && makepkg -i - Do it as root, or whatever user has permissions to do stuff on /var/abs/* (not /var/abs/local)

mrunion · 2007-06-15 16:47:42

Cool! Thanks! I really REALLY need to read up on some basic commands (a.k.a. what "sed" is doing, etc.)

Arch Linux

#1 2007-05-17 16:06:33

ESD bug

#2 2007-05-17 17:11:27

Re: ESD bug

#3 2007-05-17 17:21:25

Re: ESD bug

#4 2007-05-17 17:51:52

Re: ESD bug

#5 2007-05-17 18:39:08

Re: ESD bug

#6 2007-05-17 18:40:52

Re: ESD bug

#7 2007-05-17 19:43:01

Re: ESD bug

#8 2007-05-17 19:51:59

Re: ESD bug

#9 2007-05-17 20:05:33

Re: ESD bug

#10 2007-05-17 21:19:22

Re: ESD bug

#11 2007-05-18 03:56:00

Re: ESD bug

#12 2007-05-18 06:13:18

Re: ESD bug

#13 2007-05-18 15:00:33

Re: ESD bug

#14 2007-05-18 15:28:26

Re: ESD bug

#15 2007-05-18 16:37:34

Re: ESD bug

#16 2007-05-18 17:37:40

Re: ESD bug

#17 2007-05-29 03:58:18

Re: ESD bug

#18 2007-05-29 15:43:08

Re: ESD bug

#19 2007-06-12 03:10:27

Re: ESD bug

#20 2007-06-12 09:30:55

Re: ESD bug

#21 2007-06-15 14:24:25

Re: ESD bug

#22 2007-06-15 16:06:08

Re: ESD bug

#23 2007-06-15 16:47:42

Re: ESD bug

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