Forums » Linux

audio driver detection

May 05, 2008 mr_spuck link
Would it be a problem to only fall back to oss if no driver was set instead of every time the device is blocked?

I'm normally using alsa. If my device is blocked for some reason it will fall back to oss, set that as the active driver in the config file and in turn prevent everything else from using the device.
Since the driver switching at run time still doesn't always work I usually have to edit the config file to get alsa back.

Most apps I know would just stick to what's set by the user.
May 05, 2008 roguelazer link
This isn't really an answer to your question, but why don't you just enable dmix in alsa? No modern system should not have the ability to run multiple audio applications at once.
May 05, 2008 mr_spuck link
I do have dmix enabled ... but some apps don't play well with it and block anyway. Flash and anything that uses oss mostly.
Jun 13, 2008 Unit382456 link
I'm not sure if this is related to your problem but:

I tried to install the Creative X-Fi sound driver for Linux, no my VO automatically switches to OSS and I hear no sound. Worse, I can't find the CX-Fi files & delete them.

But I was messing around in System>Preferences>Sound and this is what I Have:

Nvidia CK8S - IEC958: Shows "Testing..." Dialog but no testing sound.

Nvidia CK8s through OSS = "audiotestsrc wave=sine freq=512 ! audioconvert ! audioresample ! gconfaudiosink: Could not open audio device for playback. Device is being used by another application."

PulseAudio = Testing Dialog with Testing sound.

So, I was thinking, If PA was the only (correctly) working SD, is it possible to run VO using PulseAudio Sound Server?
Jun 14, 2008 yodaofborg link
VO works fine with the PulseAudio sound server, but it uses ALSA emulation (or OSS emulation) and does a terrible job of ALSA mixing (ALSA Apps block the sound card, no matter how dmix is configured).

To work aound this you could try telling VO to use ALSA (config.ini in [Vendetta] Section change AudioDriver=OSS driver to AudioDriver=ALSA driver) then run VO with the command

pasuspend ~/bin/vendetta

VO still blocks the sound card, but this was the only way I could get my microphone working with VO. Of course the only other option would be for the devs to add a pulse driver to VO, which although should not be that hard, is it worth spending time on something which really could just be another *nix phase?

Heres some links to other projects that either have source for a driver, or have info on the spreading sound server..

http://www.xmms.org/plugins.php?details=241
http://www.lastlog.de/wiki/index.php/Pulseaudio
http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/PerfectSetup
Jun 15, 2008 raybondo link
As of VO 1.8.21 the Linux version always tries ALSA first, ignoring the AudioDriver setting in config.ini.