Re: erratic sound

[Grahame Bowland <gbowland ucc gu uwa edu au>]

On Mon, May 15, 2000 at 09:40:38AM -0400, jack wallen jr wrote:
> actually mine is just that sometimes sound plays and sometimes it
> doesn't.  if i use anything other than esdplay (like play for
> instance) the esdplay sound dies until i run something like xmms.  this
> especially happens when my procmail system plays a sound for an incoming
> e-mail.  sound always dies following that (some of my sounds in procmail
> use the play command).  could it be the mixing of play and esdplay is
> killing sound?

I observed a strange problem with sound playing under Gnome and Win2000 
recently. The OSS drivers in combination with ESD gave a distorted sound, 
but ALSA didn't. Same with MS's drivers. Increasing the PCI latency time in 
my bios was the magic fix, but I'm not sure of the underlying issue causing it.

Otherwise, I've noticed that non-ESD aware applications can be a problem. 
They'll open /dev/dsp and ESD will stop working as the device is in use. That 
is probably what 'play' does - perhaps ESD doesn't properly retry after a 
failure.  XMMS might do something to fix this.

-- 
Grahame Bowland                             gbowland@ucc.asn.au
                                     http://gbowland.ucc.asn.au
                                                   0419 205 123