Suse 11.1 KDE4. Intermittent sound problems. For example when Amarok plays music, Internet browsers are unable to playback audio. No sound via skype. Cannot bring up alsa mixer.
Anyone seen this:
russ@linux-wqsh:~> alsamixer
ALSA lib pulse.c:272:(pulse_connect) PulseAudio: Unable to connect: Connection refused
alsamixer: function snd_ctl_open failed for default: Connection refused
This is not uncommon and it is one of the reasons why the developers are pushing pulse audio on Linux. Typically, Linux struggles with multiple applications trying to access the audio device at the same time, and dependant on the sound daemon/server in use, only one application can access the audio device.
Now the alsa API will allow multiple devices to access the audio device at once, but not all multimedia devices use the alsa API. You could check your applications to see if they allow you to tune the audio output module to the ALSA API.
You can read more about this here: Sound-concepts - openSUSE and if you wish to determine which application has seized your audio device and is not sharing it, you can use the command noted in this guide: SDB:AudioTroubleshooting - openSUSE - determining which application is using the sound device
Thanks for your reply. I just restart with rsalsasound to make browser or another app work. Skype is still a no go. But after reading up it seems that 11.1+KDE4.1.3 will require a lot of tuning and work. Going back…