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aRts, ALSA, and other sound card stuff
The past few days I've been trying to learn as much as I can about aRts, ALSA...sound in Linux in general. One problem I was having was that aRts would tell me that real-time scheduling was working. It'd give a suggestion on how to fix it that to a newbie like me sounded like pig-latin. I did a search on this forums and found a lot of threads with the same problem presented, but no answers. Well my friends, I have the answer! Logically enough, I got it from the aRts website(http://www.arts-project.org/). And I quote:
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13.4 Realtime priority doesn't seem to have any effect for me?
Verify that artswrapper is really installed suid root, like it is supposed to be. A lot of distributions (SuSE7.x for instance) don't do this. You can verify this using: ls -l $(which artswrapper). Good:
% ls -l $(which artswrapper)
-rwsr-xr-x 1 root root 4556 Sep 24 18:05 /opt/kde2/bin/artswrapper
Bad:
% ls -l $(which artswrapper)
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4556 Sep 24 18:05 /opt/kde2/bin/artswrapper
If you are not having the s, you can get it using:
% chown root $(which artswrapper)
% chmod 4755 $(which artswrapper)
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I hope you all find this useful! By the way, I can't seem to get more than one program using my sound card at a time, though the documentation for both ALSA and aRts insists that they support that. Anyone have any insights? Another thing I noticed...when I run artsshell and use the "status" command, it tells me aRts is using OSS...but I'd rather it use ALSA. How can I change this at startup? I'm using Mandrake 9.1, btw.
Last edited by matthurne; 09-12-2003 at 02:16 AM.
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Haha, well I'll answer one of my own questions...to have aRts use ALSA instead of OSS automatically at startup, just go into the KDE control panel's sound settings. Look under Sound System->Sound I/O...where it says Sound I/O method, I switched it from Autodetect to ALSA. Upon reboot I ran artsshell and checked the status, and confirmed that aRts is now using ALSA. Yay. :-) Still can't use multiple programs with sound at the same time. I noticed that XMMS doesn't use aRts by default...but hmm, there's a plugin for it on the website. I'm going to try that. Perhaps aRts only allows programs to share the soundcard when all the programs in question are using aRts rather than ALSA directly? I could've swore that ALSA said it supported multiple programs using the sound card at one time too. Hmm. Any help out there?
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You can set the autosuspend to about 15 seconds in the sound system menu. This will free up the sound device so xmms can use it.
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Good call, I actually figured that out earlier doing some reading. Hehe...I set it at 5 seconds which turned out to be very helpful. I find it odd that most of the programs I use need the aRts server suspended or not running to play sound...what's the point of the aRts server then? I tried to install the aRts plugin for XMMS to see what help that might give, but couldn't get it installed.
Just so ya'll know, running the command "artsshell" and then "status" at the prompt (>) is very useful, more useful than that dang GUI.
I'm going to put my old SB Live in here tonight and see if that allows me to have sound from multiple programs at once. If so, I'll know its a driver thing and not an ALSA/aRts thing. By the way, the card I'm using currently is the AOpen Cobra AW850...it uses the C-Media 8738 chip. Great card in Windows, especially for the price! With 5.1 support. If I were using Windows that stupid SB Live wouldn't stand a chance. Perhaps in Linux it will...sadly...
I post back with my results.
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Update
Well, I went ahead and took out the C-Media 8738 card and put in the Live. After some funky configuring with Mandrake's tools and a reboot, it works. Now here's the important part:
With the SBLive, I can have sounds play from more than one program at a time...but with the C-Media card, I can't.
Also, the SBLive drivers being used don't use ALSA, they use OSS. The C-Media card used ALSA.
I'm just going to assume that the drivers that were written by C-Media for their card (they did write them, they're on the C-Media website) must've been the problem. The C-Media card was actually better in WindowsXP for me than the Live. Must be a lot more has gone into the Live Linux drivers since its a much more well-known card.
Anyone with questions, go ahead and post, I have certainly learned a few things. I'm going to see if there are ALSA drivers for the Live...I don't like the idea of the whole proprietary OSS crap from 4Front.
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Well I used Mandrake's Hardware utility "harddrake" to mess with the driver of the sound card. I read in another forum that when you select the driver, "emu10k1" is the OSS driver for the SBLive and "snd-emu10k1" is the ALSA driver. Turns out they were right. I've been using headphones to listen to XMMS and I crap you not, the ALSA drivers sound MUCH better.
I guess that wraps up this silly "talking to myself" thread...post any questions...
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