Hi, if I have amarok open and try to use youtube there is no sound, I can exit amarok and restart firefox and the movie will play-with sound- just fine, then if I start amarok up again it says “xine failed to initialize any sound drivers” I can close both and restart amarok for playback after that. Similarly if I let the machine run unattended for a long time the audio drivers will quit completely and I wont get any sound until I go to yast and restart the sound system. Thanks for any help.
I am new to suse and am running 11.1 with kde 4.2.4 I have an xfx GeForce 8200 motherboard and use the alsa sound drivers with the onboard realtek card.
What might be useful is to brush up on some openSUSE Linux sound concepts so you can understand the limitations of sound in Linux. Sound-concepts - openSUSE
Most Linux sound daemons/servers will NOT allow more than one application to share the sound. Hence if one sound device is using the sound, another is not allowed to use it.
The exceptions to that are the alsa api and pulse audio (where they WILL share the audio). Pulse audio is relatively new, and it was implemented in part to specifically allow multiple applications to share the sound device. However pulse audio is buggy. Real buggy … Did I say pulse was buggy?
The alsa api “route” is what I often try to set up on my PC. Maybe someday I’ll switch to tuning pulse … but its not there yet, and neither am I. Pulse is still buggy. You will find many applications allow one to select the sound engine, and hence one can often select the output sound module (or sound engine) to be pulse, or alsa. I usually select alsa when it is a choice.
In the case of Amarok, one can select “xine” to be the sound engine. After selecting that, one can then separately launch “xine” (assuming one has installed ‘xine-ui’ (the xine user interface)) and in “xine” select alsa as the output sound module. By doing that, Amarok is using the alsa api and hence it will share its audio.
As for flash, … I don’t know where to tell it to share its audio output.
Its not easy, and thats why pulse is being implemented to eventually make this easier. … but , … did I say pulse was buggy ?