So I have opensuse 11.2 installed with the latest version of kde. boot, root, and swap are hanging out loving life while home is in a software raid 10.
So many years ago I installed an Xmystique 71 gold card. Works great, but only for one app. I pause a movie and want to crank some tunes it gives me fits. I am not a fan of this. I love my opensuse raid 10 but the sound is just killing me. Should I disable the Xmystique card and enable the default motherboard shwag? The embedded sound really is not that bad and should it give me a solution, as in I can utilize sound in more than one app at a time, I will gladly take it.
Would love some help here. I mean who does not want to utilize amarok whithout shutting down youtube or vlc or kaffeine or whatever.
I am wondering if your post is on the wrong forum. Your X-Mystique card is obviously recognized by the system because you can use it with some apps. Hence it is not really a hardware problem but a Multimedia problem.
By the way, do you mean that you can use it with only one app at a time but all apps are usable with it under those circumstances?
I am not an expert but it looks as though each app tries to own the sound device /dev/dsp exclusively. Normally there is a mixer program, that should own that device, and all apps use the mixer concurrently. 80% of that explanation may just be babble however.
If you close this post and ask the same question under Multimedia then more experts such as ‘oldcpu’ could give you a hand. Read the ‘sticky’ cited at the start of that forum to make sure you have your sound system set up more or less correctly.
I suggest you title your new post “X-Mystique sound card only allows access by one app at a time” or something similar.
I know nothing about your hardware, so I won’t provide any advice specific to your hardware.
Linux has a deserved bad reputation for applications not sharing the sound device with each other. There are two ways to address that that I know of:
select the alsa API in most multimedia applications. ALSA, in addition to being the sound driver, also comes with an API that can be used by applications if so desired. For some (not all) hardware the alsa API will allow the audio device to be shared, even if a multimedia application has not let go of the audio device (via the alsa API). This may also mean for KDE users that they need to select the xine backend in their desktop, and then go into xine (via the xine-ui application) and select the ALSA API in xine.
use pulse audio to share the audio device. In openSUSE-11.2, Pulse audio is enabled in Gnome (by default) but disabled in KDE (by default). One of the features of Pulse audio is it is supposed to allow sharing of the audio hardware device. Unfortunately pulse still has a reputation for being buggy, so this may not be so simple to setup.
Note, I am a KDE user and as such I do not use pulse audio and hence I can not offer much in the line of help with pulse audio.