Re: [LAU] Equivalent to reason?

"If you have tried all the other fixes for sound in flash. Close all
browsers and open programs. Open a terminal and type in
Code:
killall esd
Then start Firefox and see if flash has sound. If it dose you may have
to do this to make sure that other applications are not using the
sound card."
from: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=202537&highlight=sound

"Can't get sound and compiz to work"
from: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=792183&highlight=sound

"broken sound after upgrade"
from: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=795853&highlight=sound

Those were just a few of the hits on the first page of results for a
search of "sound" on the ubuntu forums. Without fail it was a case of
using incompatible audio backends. In the sense that there is a known
way to make the audio work (set up all apps manually to use the same
backend, or only use one backend at a time), then yeah it is "fixed".
In terms of usability, it is not fixed until people don't need to
start these threads. Once again, I am a Linux advocate, and if there
actually was a consistant software mixing backend installed in linux
systems, I would probably be manually turning it off by personal
preference. But I would hardly consider the issue fixed yet for a
typical desktop user.

You don't see many graphic apps expecting to hog all of the the
framebuffers, or refusing to work with any but one window manager, why
should we expect less of sound? For most users audio is less of a
baseline usability issue, so the infrastructure is less mature and it
is easier to cope with it being broken. But it is still broken.

As I said, I have been using Linux for over a decade, primarily for
audio, and I don't have all my audio apps set to use the same backend,
and I have to pick between audio using apps (if I want to watch a
youtube video in firefox I need to shut down my jack server, and most
of the apps using it, first, or download the raw file so I can watch
it in an app that uses jack - unless there is some way to do this with
portaudio I am ignorant of? I have had zero luck making jack use
dmix).
for reference, here is a url for the search:
http://ubuntuforums.org/search.php?searchid=41308245

On Thu, May 15, 2008 at 2:43 PM, Lee Revell <rlrevell@email-addr-hidden-job.com> wrote:
> On Thu, May 15, 2008 at 4:16 PM, Justin Smith <noisesmith@email-addr-hidden> wrote:
>> For all I know you are right, but the Ubuntu forums are full of people
>> claiming to have this problem. What is this solution you speak of? I
>> know you could mean pulseaudio or dmix or esd or arts or jackd, or
>> something else I haven't heard of, but which one? We all know you
>> cannot use them all together with a normal sound card.
>
> First it was solved with dmix by default back in ALSA 1.0.8 or so,
> then more recently solved in a better way with Pulseaudio.
>
> Got any pointers to forum threads?
>
> Lee
>
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Received on Fri May 16 08:15:02 2008