Sound issue, xmms

[Gain Paolo Mureddu]

Chadley Wilson wrote:

>Hi there,
>
>Could any one explain this interesting problem?
>
>I have done a google for this nd am empty handed.
>
>I open XMMS and set alsa as the default sound?
>it plays one mp3 then hangs.
>Even if I let the mp3 finish so that the next in the playlist starts
>automatically.
>
>My version 1.2.10 from ayo.freshrpms.net (xmms-1.2.10-9.1.1.fc3.fr)
>
>Even if I start a GUI session as root it does the same.
>
>the sound card is this:
>[root at chadlap ~]# lspci | grep -i audio
>00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corp. 82801DB/DBL/DBM
>(ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 03)
>  
>
I hate to give bad news... It seems your card (actually the snd-intel8x0 
driver for your specific sound chip) doesn't support HW mixing, and as 
such multiple sound streams at once (you have enabled system sounds, 
which will cause a lock on the sound resource)... Thare're ways around 
it... The so called dmix "black art". I'd suggest you looking for the 
dmix alsa-plugin iformation (don't worry, you already have it installed, 
is part of the alsa-lib package) at http://alsa.opensrc.org/

Just for completeness sake, what does cat /proc/asound/pcm returns?? In 
my case (I have two cards, emu10k1 [SB-Live!] and on-board intel8x0 [SiS 
7012]) You will notice the Intel8x0 one can only handle one stream at a 
time, while the Live! can handle 32... Well theoretically, since the 
driver (boundled with Fedora) only allows for 21. There's a patch for 
this, but is only available for alsa-CVS:

[gianni at Blackhawk ~]$ cat /proc/asound/pcm
00-00: emu10k1 : EMU10K1 : playback 32 : capture 1
00-01: emu10k1 mic : EMU10K1 MIC : capture 1
00-02: emu10k1 efx : EMU10K1 EFX : playback 8 : capture 1
01-00: Intel ICH : SiS SI7012 : playback 1 : capture 1
01-01: Intel ICH - MIC ADC : SiS SI7012 - MIC ADC : capture 1

In the above output the interesting bits are the combined devices 
(playback-capture):

00-00: emu10k1 : EMU10K1 : playback 32 : capture 1
01-00: Intel ICH : SiS SI7012 : playback 1 : capture 1

More than 1 stream here means HW mixing is supported by the ALSA driver 
(and/or the hardware itself). In the case of the Live! (and Audigy 
cards) the third "device" is for Digital (S/PDIF) playback/capture.

In the above mentioned WiKi pages, you will find (hopefully) the 
information you need to successfully configure dmix in your system and 
at least achieve software mixing with alsa-aware programs (such as 
esd/arts+cdplayer+xmms)... This (in my experience) will not work for OSS 
programs such as games (Quake[1,2,3], RTCW, UT[99,2k3,2k4], Doom3, NWN) 
if you want to use them with communication apps like TeamSpeak...

Good luck.