Ugly sound in gnome

newbie_gentoo · Apprentice Joined: 04 Jul 2004 Posts: 189

Hello.

I'm having a weird problem regarding sound in gnome: when I play a sound-file it plays ok, but in the end I always hear some kind of cut of sound, or a *pop*. For example, the GAIM sounds when someone types something also make that pop sound. In other programs, like XMMS, that doesn't happen.

Any ideas?

Thanks

474 · l33t Joined: 19 Apr 2002 Posts: 714

It's almost certainly an esd problem (media-sound/esound). It's a sound server, similar to artsd, used by various gnome programs but unfortunately its performance is very poor and I really wish it would go away. Hopefully gstreamer will be used natively for everything in the future or even ALSA itself (thanks to the dmix work).

If you built it with the alsa USE flag, then try building without it (i.e. so that esd will use ALSA's OSS backward compatibility features). And try the reverse scenario too if that's relevant. If you're using ALSA then be sure to use a recent kernel and recent versions of alsa-lib and alsa-utils.

A possible workaround in gaim is to use a user-land command to play sounds by configuring accordingly in the Sounds section of the preferences (select "Command" as the method). Here's an example for ALSA: