When I have two apps trying to play sound it breaks my sound all together and I can only restore it by rebooting.
Before you ask why? When I’m listening to songbird for example and then browse to a page with a youtube video and the vdeo starts playing the sound breaks.
Is this normal behaviour for openSuSE or should it just play both sounds as it would under XP?
If I play amarok and start bbc iplayer, sound is NIL @ bbc I just get amarok. Then even if I close amarok bbc will not play sound until I close FF and restart the browser.
No sys restart needed.
Hmmm, I’ll try that next time.
The capability to simultaneous play audio from two different applications has always been problematic under Linux (and not just openSUSE). For example, applications that use the alsa API can do this, but most other Linux audio API’s do not support such a capability. One of the reasons Pulse Audio is being pushed on Linux users by the Linux developers is to provide this capability. However Pulse Audio is buggy and this capability is not adequately there yet in Pulse. Some more information here: Sound-concepts - openSUSE
Thanks. That may explain why my Thunderbird sound stopped working after I removed Pulseaudio. I removed pulse to fix the sound problem after the last kernel update. seems like you’re always going round in circles.
Is it possible to just have Pulseaudio installed and not use Alsa?
It depends on what you mean by “not use Alsa”. If you mean “not use the Alsa API” then the answer is yes. But if you mean “not use Alsa kernel module” then the answer is NO for 95% of the users. If you are one of the 5% of Linux users with advanced knowledge, you may be able to use OSS, although I do not know how well OSS is maintained any more.
In essence, I would recommend you use the Alsa kernel module and do NOT waste one second considering NOT using it.
You may wish to brush up on your Linux sound basics: Sound-concepts - openSUSE
Well just an update. Yesterday I decided I’d have go at fixing my sound issues and decided to give Pulseaudio a proper go despite the negative views it receives.
It all installed fine, I then worked through the PA Perfect Setup Guide which goes through each step of configuring PA. I chose to make all audio use PA by default.
We so far it all works fine. All apps are playing sound and now I can play multiple streams, sources simultaneously and the sound is mixed. I don’t have any of the snap, crackle and pops that were documented either.
The only thing that I need to try work out is that the volume level between the apps seems to vary. Even if I set each apps volume to max the volume level between them varies.