Mysteries of sound in Fedora-9

[stan]

Timothy Murphy wrote:
> Tim wrote:
>
>>> Someone mentioned trying something like "cat foo.ogg > /dev/dsp".
>>> In my case, when sound is working this produces a white noise.
>>> Is this testing the sound driver
>>> (in my case snd_intel8x0 , I assume) directly?
>> If you catted a raw audio format, rather than a compressed one, to the
>> sound device, you ought to hear sound.  Hearing garbage isn't really
>> going to prove much.
>
> Thanks for your interest and perseverance.
>
> I gather that .wav is an uncompressed format (according to
> <http://www.webopedia.com/DidYouKnow/Computer_Science/2005/digital_audio_formats.asp>),
> but I just hear white noise if I cat this,
> while I hear the sound properly with aplay:
> -----------------------------------
> [tim at elizabeth ~]$ cat /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front_Center.wav > /dev/dsp
> [tim at elizabeth ~]$ aplay /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front_Center.wav
> -----------------------------------
>
> Do you actually hear the words if you give the first command above?
>
If you don't have the alsa oss emulation layer installed, there is 
nothing to decode the sound as if it is OSS. 
yum install alsa-oss*
The above should play after that.  While your at it you might want to 
install all of the alsa plugins,
yum install alsa-plugins*
They will give you interoperability with applications like jack and oss.