Is KDE sound daemon causing audio problems?

Nate Bargmann · External Since: Jan 26, 2009 Posts: 5

I guess the first question is whether KDE4 uses a sound daemon as in
the old days? In general sound is great, no issues, until I decide to
use a program with Wine that generates sound and then it has a lot of
pops and skips. In Virtualbox the sound is just scratchy alomst like
the old old days with a DMA conflict with DOS and Win 3.1 (I'm dating
myself).

Is there some method of forcing better sharing of the sound device?
I'll admit to not being very knowledgable making sound from non native
Linux apps work, but I seem to recall no issues before KDE4.

- Nate >>

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Nate Bargmann · External Since: Jan 26, 2009 Posts: 5

* Xavier Vello <xavier.vello.RemoveThis@gmail.com> [2009 Nov 05 04:36 -0600]:
> Le jeudi 5 novembre 2009 03:19:38, Nate Bargmann a écrit :
> > I guess the first question is whether KDE4 uses a sound daemon as in
> > the old days? In general sound is great, no issues, until I decide to
> > use a program with Wine that generates sound and then it has a lot of
> > pops and skips. In Virtualbox the sound is just scratchy alomst like
> > the old old days with a DMA conflict with DOS and Win 3.1 (I'm dating
> > myself).
> >
> > Is there some method of forcing better sharing of the sound device?
> > I'll admit to not being very knowledgable making sound from non native
> > Linux apps work, but I seem to recall no issues before KDE4.
>
> Hello
>
> Contrary to KDE3 (which uses arts), KDE4 doesn't use a sound daemon and uses
> whichever sound system (alsa, pulseaudio, oss, directx, quicktime) is default
> on the system. This is not a KDE-specific issue then.
>
> Try making sure wine uses alsa output (with the "winecfg" app) and KDE too
> (in systemsettings > multimedia).

I see no specific mention of ALSA in the system settings menu. I
noticed that my prefered sound card wasn't at the top of the output and
input lists so I changed that. In the Backend tab I only have Xine and
Aptitude shows only gstreamer as an option. Where else might I be able
to ensure ALSA and not OSS is the prefered audio device?

- Nate >>

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Nate Bargmann · External Since: Jan 26, 2009 Posts: 5

* Xavier Vello <xavier.vello DeleteThis @gmail.com> [2009 Nov 05 09:58 -0600]:
> > I see no specific mention of ALSA in the system settings menu. I
> > noticed that my prefered sound card wasn't at the top of the output and
> > input lists so I changed that. In the Backend tab I only have Xine and
> > Aptitude shows only gstreamer as an option. Where else might I be able
> > to ensure ALSA and not OSS is the prefered audio device?
>
> The tooltip on the devices explains what sound system it uses :
> http://alioth.debian.org/~wdgt-guest/pub/phonon_alsa.png

My tooltips match yours exactly.

> In fact, phonon uses xine for it's audio/video codecs. The output is
> controlled by phonon itself (with the "device preferences" tab).

Is there a consequence to not having Pulse audio nor Jack installed,
which I don't?

Thanks!

- Nate >>

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Cassiano Leal · External Since: Jan 15, 2009 Posts: 3

2009/11/5 Nate Bargmann <n0nb DeleteThis @n0nb.us>:
> * Xavier Vello <xavier.vello DeleteThis @gmail.com> [2009 Nov 05 09:58 -0600]:
>> > I see no specific mention of ALSA in the system settings menu. I
>> > noticed that my prefered sound card wasn't at the top of the output and
>> > input lists so I changed that. In the Backend tab I only have Xine and
>> > Aptitude shows only gstreamer as an option. Where else might I be able
>> > to ensure ALSA and not OSS is the prefered audio device?
>>
>> The tooltip on the devices explains what sound system it uses :
>> http://alioth.debian.org/~wdgt-guest/pub/phonon_alsa.png
>
> My tooltips match yours exactly.
>
>> In fact, phonon uses xine for it's audio/video codecs. The output is
>> controlled by phonon itself (with the "device preferences" tab).
>
> Is there a consequence to not having Pulse audio nor Jack installed,
> which I don't?

Yes!

Pulse: your sound might work without it. With it, good luck.

Jack: not really. Jack is a low latency sound server used mostly for
audio production. Most users won't need it, although generally having
it installed has no side effects.

Cassiano

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Nate Bargmann · External Since: Jan 26, 2009 Posts: 5

* Xavier Vello <xavier.vello.DeleteThis@gmail.com> [2009 Nov 06 13:39 -0600]:
> > > In fact, phonon uses xine for it's audio/video codecs. The output is
> > > controlled by phonon itself (with the "device preferences" tab).
> > Is there a consequence to not having Pulse audio nor Jack installed,
> > which I don't?
>
> You don't need any of the two. alsa (with dmix) should work fine.
>
> Please try other sound apps (for instance 'mplayer -ao alsa $a_mp3_file.mp3').
> But the issue is definitely not in KDE, maybe a buggy new version of your sound
> driver (in the kernel).

Interestingly, this particular app with Wine, Morse Runner (an amateur
radio Morse code trainer) will not output any sound except when the OSS
drivers are selected. I have verified this behavior on my desktop
which uses the emu10k driver and two separate laptops (one with Sid and
the other Lenny) with AC97 (i810) audio sets. The result is the same,
poor audio quality.

On my desktop guest OSes in VirtualBox have scratchy audio. The Wine
app has dropouts. It's a bit frustrating as it seems as though audio
isn't exactly cutting edge stuff any more (says me who wouldn't dare
try to deal with the internals of audio drivers and is in awe of those
who do).

It's not the end of the world or even an app I use much. I was just
curious of the experiences of others. Thaks for the help.

- Nate >>

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