[wplug] SOUND!

[Brandon Kuczenski]

On Sun, 19 Sep 2004, Jeremey Wise wrote:
> >
> > Barring any further information from the local list, can anyone suggest
> > who I should email next?  ESounD doesn't seem to have a support list, alsa
> > is just the 'driver' portion, and debian or gnome just seem too distant
> > from my project.  But I must admit, I'm going to probably have to take
> > this to the Debian list because I am out of steam.
>
> Late to the game but just out of curiosity, what exactly is you issue /
> configuration. I see a discussion of how well Linux Sound works with a
> vote to yeild little outside of getting a quick pulse. As for helping
> you out details are required.
>

I clarified this a little bit in a later e-mail, but for greater clarity:

 - System is Debian Sarge (Testing, aka 3.1) on a Thinkpad T23 with the
Intel i810 sound chip.  Kernel is 2.6.8 and custom.  Tried both ALSA and
OSS and have gotten both to the same minimal level of functionality but
broke it trying to improve (details below).  Current state: I just
re-installed ALSA and need to figure out how to suppress OSS.
  With regard to that, I had gotten it to work before by 'blacklisting'
the OSS drivers in /etc/discover.conf to prevent them from loading, but
that seemed like a hack and I would like to know the right way to do that.

 - Can't play multiple audio sources simultaneously, under Gnome.  There
seems to be a KDE-related package called "aRts" which brokers my sound
card to different programs at the cost of some detectable delay.  ESD is
supposed to be the analogue for Gnome (my preference) but has no
documentation.

 - Flash videos running in-browser play silently, no matter what the rest
of the architecture is.  THis seems to be a widespread solution with a
variety of apocryphal solutions, none of which have worked for me,
including: setting liberal permissions on /dev/dsp* and /dev/mixer*;
adding a wrapper script to Firefox which somehow initializes sound
(further information is lacking); some other things that didn't apply to
my software.

I believe that if I successfully re-remove the OSS drivers then I'll be
back to "minimally acceptable functionality" (i.e. 'being able to watch
DVDs').  But I would eventually like to move beyond minimal standards of
acceptability.

With regards to the "try another distro" idea, I most likely will on my
desktop computer, despite the fact that I really like the more
'bread-and-butter' aspects of Debian.

-Brandon