Troubleshooting sound on Redhat EL

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Wednesday, February 1st, 2006

My goal is to be able to hear system alerts mixed in while listening to an mp3. I thought I had that set up properly, but when I tried to adjust the levels on my microphone, I screwed it all up.

So here is what I have to work with:

XMMS has these options for output: OSS or esound gstreamer has these options for input: ALSA, Artsd, ESD, OSS gstreamer has these options for output: ALSA, ESD, OSS GAIM has these options: ESD, Arts

I’m trying to use ALSA wherever possible and the problem I’m getting is that alert sounds just queue up until I turn off the music player.

I have the bad feeling that if I made a big matrix and tested every possible option, it still wouldn’t work right. Even though it was working just hours ago… I think.

OK, here goes. I’m starting with this config: XMMS: OSS output gstreamer default sink: ALSA gstreamer default source: ESD GAIM sound method: automatic

That plays the song just fine, but gaim alerts wait until after the song is turned off.

Next try: XMMS: OSS gstreamer sink: alsa gstreamer source: alsa GAIM sound method: automatic

Still queues the alerts.

It seems that XMMS ought to have an ALSA output plugin…

When I try XMMS esound, I don’t get any output of the music. That’s probably the key.

Wrong. Well, there is at least one way to do this and stay within the ALSA world. A very helpful page can be found on the gentoo forums. It gives instructions on how to configure each app that uses sound to use the dmix device. Yuck. But it works.


Hey, Redhat tech support was really helpful! Here’s what they said: 

Alsa card will support multiple channels for sound card which have hardware support for the same. 
To workaround this, please use esound under Gnome. Please follow the steps mentioned below for the same

* From Gnome Sound prefences enable "Enable sound server startup:

* Use "esound" output for XMMS

* "ESD" for "Sound Method" in Gaim

* Firefox should be able to automagically use "esound" output.

I also had to switch my gstreamer sink and source to esd and then log out and log in. Oh, and I had to back out all the weird alsa configurations I did to ~/.asoundrc and /etc/asound.

Presto, it all works.

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