Flash, Amarok, and smplayer can play sound individually, but can not share audio. That is so primitive. Do I need pulseaudio how to be able to watch youtube without exiting amarok?
I am not sure that anybody in the world really needs pulseaudio as I normally disable it the first time I load openSUSE. But that is another subject. When you want to share audio files, that would normally be a function of the audio player. But first, Linux machines have two ways to share files, NFS or SMB. One is built-in to Linux and designed to share files with other Linux Machines (NSF). On the other hand SMB uses SAMBA, to share files with Windows computers and other Linux computers which are running Samba. Both methods require some setup and configuration to be used. File sharing in general is turned off by default.
Once you start running one of the file sharing systems, then you can use a music player to serve up songs to other computers. There are applications that try to take on the whole task, such as XBMC, which you can load into Linux. A whole different world of setup from Linux is required for the likes of XBMC, but it is worth it if you spend the time to get it setup. Another one is called MythTV, originally designed as a TV viewer, but one that now is also a complete media solution. MythTV is even harder to setup. I suggest you search around for media sharing and Amarok to see what extra steps are required since it is simpler and built-in to openSUSE.
Linux is kind of a do it your own self operating system. It has the right price, but may require some extra effort for some of the other things you have come to expect with the not free Microsoft Windows.
Thank You,
When I play something on flash, there is no sound on smplayer. if I’m listening to something on amarok, I get no sound playing something with flash. I read that it was a limitation of ALSA, which is why I asked if I need pulseaudio to be able to share the sound card.
Moin Moin,
boast wrote:
> Flash, Amarok, and smplayer can play sound individually, but can not
> share audio. That is so primitive. Do I need pulseaudio how to be able
> to watch youtube without exiting amarok?
normally an application using the sound devices blocks these for other
applciations, that does make sense.
There are two ways to get around this:
1.) a sound server like enligthened sound daemon or pulse audio
2.) a modern sound hardware that supports hardware mixing in combination
with the alsa sound driver
What results you get actually depends on your hardware, your skills and the
phase of the moon in comparison to the sweetness of the sugar cubes in your
coffee mug.
Pulse audio is always bashed on, said to be the cause of all troubles in the
universe. I myself have great positiv experiences with it, use it and all
attempts to get sound mixing without it failed for me.
So, choose yourself 
Are you on KDE or Gnome? Sounds like you are on KDE as PA is not enabled by default. There may be a good reason for that? Gnome needs it, so it’s on by default.
It has already been said that you can run an alternative sound server, so when I need to, I run Jack. That’s the professional quality linux sound server, and runs well on openSUSE even with the default desktop kernel. It does however need a little initial tuning of its settings to match your pc’s resources.
boast wrote:
>
> jdmcdaniel3;2219419 Wrote:
>> I am not sure that anybody in the world really needs pulseaudio as I
>> normally disable it the first time I load openSUSE. But that is another
>> subject. When you want to share audio files, that would normally be a
>> function of the audio player. But first, Linux machines have two ways
>> to share files, NFS or SMB. One is built-in to Linux and designed to
>> share files with other Linux Machines (NSF). On the other hand SMB uses
>> SAMBA, to share files with Windows computers and other Linux computers
>> which are running Samba. Both methods require some setup and
>> configuration to be used. File sharing in general is turned off by
>> default.
>>
>> Once you start running one of the file sharing systems, then you can
>> use a music player to serve up songs to other computers. There are
>> applications that try to take on the whole task, such as XBMC, which you
>> can load into Linux. A whole different world of setup from Linux is
>> required for the likes of XBMC, but it is worth it if you spend the time
>> to get it setup. Another one is called MythTV, originally designed as a
>> TV viewer, but one that now is also a complete media solution. MythTV
>> is even harder to setup. I suggest you search around for media sharing
>> and Amarok to see what extra steps are required since it is simpler and
>> built-in to openSUSE.
>>
>> Linux is kind of a do it your own self operating system. It has the
>> right price, but may require some extra effort for some of the other
>> things you have come to expect with the not free Microsoft Windows.
>>
>> Thank You,
>
> When I play something on flash, there is no sound on smplayer. if I’m
> listening to something on amarok, I get no sound playing something with
> flash. I read that it was a limitation of ALSA, which is why I asked if
> I need pulseaudio to be able to share the sound card.
I fixed that in 11.3 by disabling/removing pulseaudio. Check amarok-
>settings->playback then “configure phonon”. If that tells you it is using
pulseaudio, try killing it.
–
Will Honea
I use kde. I guess I’ll try installing pulseaudio, because setting alsa for xine, jack for smplayer, and OSS for flash seems a bit complicated and weird. I guess I’m used to sharing audio in gnome/debian.
Is there a good guide for installing/setting up pulseaudio for opensuse 11.3?
Is there a good guide for installing/setting up pulseaudio for opensuse 11.3? openSUSE doesn’t have good wiki contributors like UBUNTU, which sucks. Do I follow ArchWiki’s pulseaudio setup?
(4 day bump)
Since the default openSUSE KDE configuration disables PA and the Gnome default enables it and (IIRC) provides for settings, why would a wiki article be needed? I guess the devs disabled it due to users having problems and complaints about KDE and PA. If you get it working to your satisfaction using whoever’s setup you can find, you can become a contributor of a good wiki article.
thanks for the support, finally got an ideal setup going!!! 
I can now play flash/smplayer/amarok at the same time.
I installed “pulseaudio” from yast. Then did “setup-pulseaudio --enable” as root. Then my /etc/asound.conf is
pcm.pulse {
type pulse
}
ctl.pulse {
type pulse
}
pcm.!default {
type pulse
}
ctl.!default {
type pulse
}
pcm.phononpulse {
type plug
slave.pcm {
type pulse
}
hint {
show on
description "PulseAudio"
}
}
which “sends the sound via Alsa before it goes to PulseAudio”
Thanks to PulseAudio - ArchWiki
A million thanks! I have been trying to achieve this since 2009, but it wasn’t until I tried your tips that I managed to finally get audio mixing to work
One additional note: I had to install also “pulseaudio-module-x11”. This I noticed when comparing my Phonon configuration dialog to screenshots shown at http://pulseaudio.org/wiki/KDE. I have some other pulse related libs installed, too (such as “alsa-plugins-pulse”, “libxine1-pulse” and “vlc-aout-pulse”), but I have no idea whether these are required or not. I’m using KDE 4.5.3, and even kMix shows the stream volume controls nicely.
Once more, a big thank you! PulseAudio rocks.
Each app in Linux uses this or that sound server that serves as a bridge between app and ALSA/hardware. So to say its quite natural that two apps cant use one audio card at a time without a sound server. You must configure it first. For ex. you can make mplayer and qmmp use pulse-audio sound server so they could be played simultaneously, and you can configure vlc to use jack or whatever u have there. Anyway, I guess u got the idea. Here is a pic to get u scared of what is audio system in Linux today:
http://matt.bottrell.com.au/uploads/Pics/linuxaudio.png
but here is a useful link about sound system in suse http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Sound_concepts
Yes, it works absolutely flawless, as far as I’m concerned
If anyone is interested, at flash-and-pulseaudio-in-opensuse-11-3 I have written about my findings.