Linux and Sound

[Greg Rundlett]

On Fri, Mar 14, 2008 at 9:39 AM, Ted Roche <tedroche at tedroche.com> wrote:

> "Linux and Sound" might be too over-arching a presentation topic, but it
> might be fun if we have someone in the group (or perhaps at a nearby
> vendor of Linux distributions, hint, hint) who has an understanding of
> the depth and breadth of sound issues on Linux. There are driver issues,
> ALSA issues, OSS issues, ESD issues and now PulseAudio issues. I'd be
> interested in attending a presentation if anyone knows how to diagnose,
> troubleshoot and fix problems like this. Maybe there are some tools I'm
> not aware of. This seems like a common complaint.
>
> One of the fellows at MonadLUG was bemoaning the fact that sound would
> no longer work after running Wine and he could only figure out how to
> get it going again by rebooting.
>
> I had something similar, with my Fedora 8 system. After a
> suspend-and-resume cycle, sound would no longer play. I couldn't find
> any widgets to wiggle or daemons to restart to get it to work, but sound
> would be back after the next time I restarted my machine. My Google-foo
> was not very powerful on this one, but I finally found a work-around,
> here:
>
>
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bugs/F8Common#head-97f4b5519a7205c8d52e77f99543434cc882936a
>
> which essential says to toggle from terminal to X session "a couple of
> times" and sound will return. Alt-Ctrl-F3 to a terminal window and
> Ctrl-Alt-F7 once didn't work, but Ctrl-Alt-F4 and Ctrl-Alt-F7 three
> times did :)
>
> Bizarre, but it's a work-around that I thought might help others.
>
> So, would anyone be interested in talking about this at a LUG meeting,
> or coralling someone who would?
>


I'd be interested in hearing the presentation :-)

I don't think I'm qualified to present a talk about the system-level of
sound in Linux.  After reviewing some of the available information out
there, it just gets more confusing.  For example, on the PulseAudio wiki it
says that Audacity doesn't yet support PulseAudio, so if I want to use that
application I'd have to kill PulseAudio first!? [0]  I found this
informative post about the state of sound in Linux:
http://insanecoding.blogspot.com/2007/05/sorry-state-of-sound-in-linux.html
As a free software advocate, I'm sorry to see the mixed history of the OSS
system.  Perhaps the licensing will get straightened out so that it's widely
used again.  With so many work-arounds listed in the 'perfect setup' for
PulseAudio, it seems like we're still gonna have a lot of audio difficulties
in Linux for a while.

At the user/application level, I'd be glad to make a presentation some time
about using Amarok and other applications to enjoy your music collection on
Linux and your portable music player.

It looks like both Fedora [1] and Ubuntu [2]  are adopting PulseAudio [3]
(to replace ESD).

At the same time there is a lot of work going on at the hardware + kernel
and driver / sound server level, there is much work going on in the
application and framework layers because everything is getting so much more
'multimedia'.  Also, the demand for cross-platform functionality are
increasing.  As an example, KDE is adopting [3] Phonon (the cross platform
multimedia API) [4]

[0] http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/PerfectSetup
[1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Interviews/LennartPoettering
[2] http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/hardy/alpha3
[3] http://dot.kde.org/1170773239/
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonon_%28KDE%29


-- 
A: Yes.
> Q: Are you sure?
>> A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation.
>>> Q: Why is top posting annoying in email?
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