openSUSE 11.2 64bit
libxine1 from Packman
00:14.2 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA)
Maybe it’s just an Amarok2 problem, but whenever another app (for example Konversation) plays a sound file, the audio instantly cuts out (in Amarok2) and will not come back unless I quit Amarok2 and restart it.
Amarok2 has only the options - “HDA ATI SB VT 1708S Analog” or “PulseAudio” (which is NOT installed).
Growbag, in general, there have to be dozens of threads on this. I keep typing more or less (with small changes to address specific users application notes) the same thing over and over.
Note that Linux has had a history of applications not sharing the sound device. This is true for most of the sound servers and daemons in Linux. Which means only one application at a time will be able to play sound with most of the different sound servers and sound daemons. As well often when an application has the sound device, when it closes it may, or it may not, let go of the sound device. When it does not let go of the sound device, all sound is broken until the sound server/daemon is restarted by restarting alsa. Or in other cases (possibly your Amarok example) when Amarok has the sound device and another application seizes the sound device from Amarok, when the other application is finished with the sound device and releases it, Amarok can not tell that has happened, and it needs to be restarted in order to access the sound device again (via that sound server/daemon in use).
That (single application only for sound) is one of the reasons why pulse audio was introduced. It is supposed to fix this. However as I am certain you have read, pulse audio is buggy for many users.
Note that the alsa application, in addition to providing the sound driver, also provides an API. The alsa API for many different hardware (not all) will allow sharing of the sound device. So what I do on my PCs is go into each application’s preferences, and I select ‘alsa’ as the output audio mode. When I do that, and when all my multimedia applications are all using alsa, then they can all share the sound device and multiple applications can play sound at the same time.
As a test I recently had amarok (using the xine engine), vlc and smplayer all playing sound at the same time.
Do I understand correctly that you recommend the following: If possible, use the alsa device, and, if this covers user’s needs, do not use pulseaudio.
Do you also happen to know whether the pulseaudio has hopes to improve? Or maybe it will be replaced with some server that is less buggy? Or it will go path of buggy and dumped software?
