Sound pauses with ALSA (SB Live)

jamieo · n00b Joined: 13 Jul 2002 Posts: 38 Location: Reading, UK

[I tried this in Newbies but no one seems to have had it...]

I've got everything working fine and am with Gentoo, just one problem...

I'm using ALSA, KDE, xmms and alsa-xmms (do I really need this?) and when I play mp3s the sound quality is good - much better than I've had before on linux. However, sometimes there's a pause, maybe 0.2 sec or so. As you can guess, this is a real pain.

For hardware I'm using a Soundblaster Live 5.1 card and the emu10k1 drivers for ALSA. I've just got sound support turned on in the kernel (as a module) but no module drivers at all.
BTW, I find it pauses when the machine is busy - and I think it's mostly when doing disk access. I'm not talking about busy with root processes, just doing things like a file copy. I've never had such "tasks" cause problems like this on linux.

Any ideas?

Cheers,
Jamie

g3kko

I think you need media-sound/xmms-arts.

Package Description: This output plugin allows xmms to work with arts, KDE's sound system.
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jamieo · n00b Joined: 13 Jul 2002 Posts: 38 Location: Reading, UK

Yes, using xmms-arts seems to have solved the problem.

I guess this was caused by arts and alsa trying to control the sound at the same time.

geta · Apprentice Joined: 10 May 2003 Posts: 153

Have you got any advice on how to solve that problem if I don't want to use arts?

Exactly the same problem: sound pauses on some of the many disk accesses. My config: Kernel 2.6.0, alsa-lib 1.0.0-r2, alsa-utils 1.0.0-r2, xmms 1.2.8-r3. Different soundcard though: Intel OnBoard Chip (intel-8x0 compatible)

Cheers, geta
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geta - pronounced: "djetta"