Sounds? Yes, But One Per Time!

smurfed · n00b Joined: 13 Apr 2005 Posts: 8

Hello. I'm new to the whole thing and both ALSA and OSS architectures are a little blurry to me

I have an A7N8X motherboard. With a nvidia chipset. And I cannot hear 2 sonds at the same moment, example: if i'm listening to an mp3 with xmms, i cannot hear the notify sounds of aMSN or hear a flash animation in firefox.The same with mplayer: if im watching a video, i cannot hear any other sound.

I have alsa compiled in my kernel. And i also emerged all the files necessary to work. I really dont know what to do to make it works. :oops:

ruben- · Apprentice Joined: 09 Nov 2004 Posts: 197

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_ALSA_sound_mixer_aka_dmix

- Ruben

smurfed · n00b Joined: 13 Apr 2005 Posts: 8

lspci | grep -i audio

xafan · n00b Joined: 19 Apr 2005 Posts: 13

All the same for me, I've done that HOWTO as well.

ruben- · Apprentice Joined: 09 Nov 2004 Posts: 197

Are your apps set to use ALSA output?

- Ruben

xafan · n00b Joined: 19 Apr 2005 Posts: 13

Flandry · n00b Joined: 27 Feb 2004 Posts: 52 Location: Boston, MA

Mine is doing the same thing. All of the sounds are queued up, and come out one at a time. It's annoying. I'm using a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz card.

chunderbunny · Posted: Sun May 08, 2005 11:18 am Post subject:

Well for Nforce users you can always use the proprietary Nvidia driver rather than the OSS driver. To use it you have to disable ALSA in your kernel and enable OSS (but don't enable nay OSS drivers). Then emerge nforce-audio (I think the ~arch version is best so you might want to unmask it) which will give you hardware mixing and a nicer sound.

The downsides are
a) it's a propritary driver.
b) you have to remember to re-emerge the driver every tiem you upgrade your kernel
c) the driver has a few bugs which means it won't work with a few apps (skype is probably the most annoying)

gwolf · Guru Joined: 05 May 2005 Posts: 374 Location: Estonia

I had the same problem and got it working by using esound instead of alsa directly.

hawk072 · n00b Joined: 16 Jul 2004 Posts: 10

Arainach · l33t Joined: 08 Jul 2004 Posts: 609

Presuming what hawk said is true (I have no experience with Turtle Beach cards), follow his advice and stick to hardware mixing. dmix can work but it's just a pain to configure and doesn't always work. I had it semi-working and finally just gave in, disabled my onboard sound and bought an Audigy2 ZS. I love it. About a trillion mixing channels which I can control individually on the fly, great sound quality, and it's as simple as compiling the emu10k1 driver into my kernel; no other thinking necessary.
_________________
Gentoo: Stage3 w/ NPTL & udev, gcc 3.4.4 full rebuild
Kernel: 2.6.15-gentoo-r1 w/ 1G-Lowmem Patch
System: Athlon XP 2.2Ghz/1GB Corsair Value/160GB, 250GB WD IDE/128MB GeForce 6800/Sony 17" Trinitron G200 @ 1280x1024x75Hz

placeholder · Advocate Joined: 07 Feb 2004 Posts: 2500

I use the nVidia proprietary drivers and I get Dolby Digital sound through my receiver, so recompiling it for new kernels is definitely worth it. I also do not use Skype though, so therefore I have no issues with it. You also only need sound support because adding OSS support just allows you to select drivers for OSS if the ones for your card are in the kernel. Cheers.

xafan · n00b Joined: 19 Apr 2005 Posts: 13

I just unemerged ALSA packages, added OSS to kernel compile (module), removed the ALSA tag from USE in make.conf, reemerged with newuse and then emerged nforce-audio.

....Still won't work....

chunderbunny · Posted: Tue May 10, 2005 10:03 am Post subject:

Did you modprobe nvsound? Did you completely remove all ALSA parts of the kernel?