Linux in general has various sound daemons and servers that can be used to handle the sound. In general they all only support one sound device at a time. That Linux limitation was one reason why there was a push to have pulse audio implemented, as pulse audio is supposed to provide a solution to that problem. However pulse audio has bugs and it was disabled by default in KDE4 in openSUSE-11.2.
But there is another approach. Note alsa (which is the sound driver and comes with all openSUSE versions) is more than just a sound driver, as it also supplies an alsa-API (application programming interface) in addition to the driver part of alsa. So if you go into your applications setup/preferences (such as smplayer, xine-ui, virtual box, vlc … etc … ) and select the output audio mode as “alsa” (or advanced linux sound architecture) that will likely select the alsa API for use, and then those applications should be able to share sound with each other.
Personally I installed pulse on purpose as it never gave me issues and it helps with multiple audio playback.
If you need a tutorial on how to enable/install pulse I can give it to you.
Just keep in mind for some pulse does not work, but its worth a shot and if it doesn’t work you can remove it easy.
Thank you oldcpu. I checked my apps (Smplayer, vlc, virtualbox) and they are set to “alsa” for the sound, but will not “share” with each other.
I maybe should have mentioned that before I moved to 11.2, I had 11.1 (with kde3.5) installed on this same system and it had no problem sharing the sound. Is there something that KDE4 and/or 11.2 does differently that would cause this behavior?
Thank you TaraIkeda. I would appreciate a pulseaudio installation guide that will allow me to uninstall it easily if it doesn’t work. Is it more involved than just installing the “pulseaudio” package in Yast? (I once borked by 11.1 system trying to uninstall pulseaudio so I’m a bit nervous.)
I just tested smplayer and xine on my PC. It initially it did not work (because I had smplayer optimized on alsa(0.0 - HDA Intel) instead of alsa), but once I set smplayer to pure “alsa” I had audio playing from two applications at once.
I then checked vlc and smplayer. The both played audio at the same time. The volume in vlc was VERY low compared to smplayer, but if I jacked it up, it was there.
Then I started xine, and I had xine, smplayer, and vlc all playing 3 different songs at once. It works. 3 apps at once.
You are running gnome? It appears that way from looking at those screenshots. The settings you applied appear ok, but gnome with its very much integrated pulse audio setup adds an entirely new layer to this.
The technique I applied was likely KDE specific for I am a big KDE user and I have not used an openSUSE gnome for years.
I did install a 32-bit openSUSE-11.2 gnome on a sandbox PC a few nights ago. when I get the chance I’ll check it out.
and it works - all 3 can play audio at the same time (although I do not know why in practice one would want to do that. I MUCH prefer the clean sound of one video at a time).
I’m a user. Not a programmer. Not a packager. There is not much else I can add.
Thank you much oldcpu. What’s frustrating is I did not have this problem on the same system when it was running 11.1 with KDE3.5.
You’re right that I wouldn’t want to play more than one video/song at a time. The issue is really that I can’t leave skype running all the time to receive calls like I used to (because then no sound works in anything else) and I use Virtualbox a lot and nothing else can use sound while it’s running either.
I ended up installing pulseaudio this morning per TaraIkeda’s advice, and it seemed to work well…except I’ve found no way to get skype working at all with pulseaudio installed (the only solution that works per the Opensuse and Skype help pages is “uninstall pulseaudio”). I uninstalled pulseaudio and skype works again, but the “sharing” behavior is back to how it was previously.
Nonetheless, I do appreciate you taking the time to give me advice. If I do end up figuring out What’s changed between 11.2/KDE4 and my “old” configuration that has caused this behavior I’ll post it here.
If anybody else stumbles upon this thread and can offer any advice or potential solutions, it would be much appreciated.
Xine was the one program I hadn’t tried to mess with. When I open the “Audio” tab, I only get a couple options, and none of them let me choose the audio driver. See here.
This is very minimal compared to the one oldcpu posted above. Any ideas why nothing else is showing up? Do I have something fundamentally wrong in my setup?
Under the xine setting, you need to select GUI and then Configuration Experience Level, and change that to “master of the known universe” (or something silly like that), then restart xine, and then you will have the various configuration levels available.
