No Thunderbird Sound

odontocete · n00b Joined: 27 Mar 2003 Posts: 18

I've successfully installed Gentoo on an AMD64 laptop and am running KDE 3.4.3. I can sucessfully play sounds through alsaplay and also the KDE interface plays sounds for various events, such as startup and lowering or raising windows. However, I can't get firefox to play a sound on incoming email. I've looked through all the firefox configs I can find, and I don't see a way to setup the sound device it uses.

egberts · Posted: Sun Jan 22, 2006 7:29 pm Post subject:

Firefox uses OSS sound.

You'll have to configure ALSA with OSS emulation.

As a guy that uses JACKD, I'm disappointed and can't wait for jackd emulation.
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axelmasok · Apprentice Joined: 08 Oct 2003 Posts: 171

I'll second that - this does trully suck. I have just wasted a couple hours on somehow getting sound to work properly. All the pain comes down to one thing OSS. When will all those developers learn to leave OSS in the past? I have finally got ALSA and all my apps properly mixing audio. I have had to buy a USB headset for Skype/Xten. OSS takes over sound devices and ruins everyones day. If only there was a thunderbird plugin for sound that works. BTW, I have OSS emulation and I get no sound from thunferbird.

odontocete · n00b Joined: 27 Mar 2003 Posts: 18

halfgaar · l33t Joined: 22 Feb 2004 Posts: 781 Location: Netherlands

I have never been able to let Thunderbird or Firefox make any kind of sound. It can only beep. OSS shouldn't be the problem, because that works fine. I can also play OSS and Alsa sounds simultaniously.

01mf02 · Posted: Tue Jan 31, 2006 2:51 pm Post subject:

Well, I can hear sounds in Firefox well, at least in Flash animations!

halfgaar · l33t Joined: 22 Feb 2004 Posts: 781 Location: Netherlands

Flash animations isn't the problem. I mean sounds like "play a sound when popup is blocked" or "play sound on new mail". Stuff like that.

rolyat · n00b Joined: 21 Dec 2005 Posts: 17

I just want to post I am experience the same issues. I have looked on the bugs and there is no bug report. Maybe it needs mentioning. I am running:

kde 3.4.3
kernel 2.6.15-r1
thunderbird 1.5.0.1 +crypt -debug -gnome +ipv6 -ldap -xinerama -xprint

Curious on whats causing it b/c all sounds for other apps work. Any clues?

halfgaar · l33t Joined: 22 Feb 2004 Posts: 781 Location: Netherlands

I don't have a clue, but I do know that they probably don't care. This issue exists ever since Netscape 4.7, maybe even Netscape 3.

Katphish · Apprentice Joined: 05 Dec 2005 Posts: 155

halfgaar,

Do you have esound installed? It appears that Thunderbird needs esound to play sounds:

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-231708-highlight-thunderbird+sound.html

I emerged it and now I can play sounds in Thunderbird for new mail. It is a little clipped though so I might try out YAMB as mentioned in that thread.

halfgaar · l33t Joined: 22 Feb 2004 Posts: 781 Location: Netherlands

I don't have esound. But I'm not going to install it either. I hate sound daemons... Besides, sounds in applications can be very annoying, especially when watching DVD for which you have to set the volume quite high... I let Kopete run a shell script which checks if a number of multimedia apps are be running. If not, then it plays a sound. But I can't do that with Thunderbird, so I'd rather have no sound...

egberts · Posted: Sun Aug 06, 2006 5:27 am Post subject:

Sound daemon is still the correct software architecture model to do when dealing with a wide variety of sound inputs from dozen of application.

The problem today is no centralized sound daemon.

Right now, there is a PUSH toward the use of the following sound architecture:

FLash->FireFox->PsuedoOSS->ALSA->JACK.

With this setup, one can cover almost all the applications including professional sound mixing applications. You can have your latest asound/esound/kdesound alongside as well using JACK

BUT, JACK is the RIGHT IDEA but is relatively immature with regard to error code trapping and has a tendency to lock up ENTIRE system.
_________________
Clusters of Fry's Special, AMD 2200, 2 GB DDR, 220 GB (2008.1/desktop, stage 1, -O3) x8
HP Compaq Fry's SPecial, AMD 2100, 2 GB DDR, 260 GB (2008.0/server, stage 1, -O3)
Ultra Sparc 5, 256MB, 3GB (2006.1/server, stage 1, -O3)

halfgaar · l33t Joined: 22 Feb 2004 Posts: 781 Location: Netherlands

I thought mixing in Alsa was done with dmix. When using that, applications don't have to be aware of some sound daemon or other, it can just play sound to the device, no matter if the hardware is being used (in case of non-hardware mixing soundchips).

But, dmix is something else than those sound daemons. These sound daemons can even work over a network connection... Well, useful....