How to leave artsd?

[miraceti]

Hi!

I use KDE (which I like). I also use artsd (which I like less and less) with ALSA. I would like to migrate from artsd to something else. Jack seems to be an interesting choice. However, I would like to know how to switch between them quickly and without bigger problems and what all problems I can expect.

Can anybody help?

[SinoTech]

Well, the 2.6.12 Kernel series supports SW-Mixing. So now multiple applications can access your sound devices at the same time (Until now arts (Or something similiar) has mixed all the stuff together).
Therefore you just have to set "-arts" in your USE-Flags, recompile all applications that has ARTS in their USE-Flags and after that unmerge "arts".

Add "-arts" to your USE-Falgs

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$ nano /etc/make.conf

Recompile all packages that currently use arts:

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$ emerge -N world

Unmerge arts

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$ emerge -C arts

Mfg

Sino

[Headrush]

The problem is many KDE apps only use arts for sound. (aka Kopete, I need to know when someone comes online!)
What I have done is remove arts USE flag for all packages except the few packages in KDE that I must have sound. (The ones that only use arts) Then I run the artsd server, but have it use "play" as an external player.

[miraceti]

Well, the 2.6.12 Kernel series supports SW-Mixing. So now multiple applications can access your sound devices at the same time (Until now arts (Or something similiar) has mixed all the stuff together).

What should I set up in a kernel configuration in order that it works? I have got 2.6.12 but when I want to play two sounds at the same time, I get a familiar response: "Can't open /dev/dsp!"

Thanks.

[SinoTech]

Well, the 2.6.12 Kernel series supports SW-Mixing. So now multiple applications can access your sound devices at the same time (Until now arts (Or something similiar) has mixed all the stuff together).

What should I set up in a kernel configuration in order that it works? I have got 2.6.12 but when I want to play two sounds at the same time, I get a familiar response: "Can't open /dev/dsp!"

Thanks.

Well, my kernel does it by default. I've got "gentoo-sources-2.6.12-r9" and used the kernel alsa-driver (Not the package "alsa-driver"). What's your settings ?

Mfg

Sino

[bssteph]

Well, the 2.6.12 Kernel series supports SW-Mixing. So now multiple applications can access your sound devices at the same time (Until now arts (Or something similiar) has mixed all the stuff together).

What should I set up in a kernel configuration in order that it works? I have got 2.6.12 but when I want to play two sounds at the same time, I get a familiar response: "Can't open /dev/dsp!"

Thanks.

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_ALSA_sound_mixer_aka_dmix

All my software mixing boxes have gone the way of the dodo (or the wooly mammoth, your choice) but what you are looking for is dmix, which is how you use software mixing with ALSA. The URL should help. And then you could do as one of the posts above said and have the KDE sound system use aplay or whatever.

[tomvollerthun]

And then you could do as one of the posts above said and have the KDE sound system use aplay or whatever.

But isn't the dmix-setup intended exactly to have the kernel manage the mixing of concurrent access to the sound device? Why can't the "normal" artsd be one of these processes?
If another process, say amaroK with gstreamer, wants to play although artsd is playing already, doesn't the kernel manages the proper handling transparently for the applications?

So if I just want the nice things that jack or gstreamer provide, but don't really care what the remaining stuff does and just want "it to work", can't I simply configure dmix and everything works?

Damn, I'll never understand this pesky thing under my desk...

cu, tom

[bssteph]

But isn't the dmix-setup intended exactly to have the kernel manage the mixing of concurrent access to the sound device? Why can't the "normal" artsd be one of these processes?
If another process, say amaroK with gstreamer, wants to play although artsd is playing already, doesn't the kernel manages the proper handling transparently for the applications?

So if I just want the nice things that jack or gstreamer provide, but don't really care what the remaining stuff does and just want "it to work", can't I simply configure dmix and everything works?

You're right. I was a bit inaccurate above. You configure the KDE System Notifications (technically, not the Sound Server) to play through aplay (or whatever) and for the most part, you can do without arts. If there were anything that used only arts, you'd be forced to use it (of course). And if you had two such things that demanded to use arts at the same time, you'd be stuck. It'd work, but AFAIK arts would mix those two sources before alsa/dmix were applied.

dmix will let gstreamer + artsd, gstreamer + aplay, aplay + aplay, etc., work fine via software mixing.

EDIT: And if you're asking why there can't just be two artsd processes, well, that's exactly what artsd is supposed to not do, by design. Although that design is undesirable behavior in most situations when you have dmix working.

On that note, is anyone aware of anything that uses ONLY arts?

[tomvollerthun]

EDIT: And if you're asking why there can't just be two artsd processes, well, that's exactly what artsd is supposed to not do, by design. Although that design is undesirable behavior in most situations when you have dmix working.

In all honesty, I wasn't thinking so far: it was just that I planned to use gstreamer but can't be bothered to recompile KDE without arts, so I basically want to use everything (read: arts) as before and gstreamer on top of it -- in this situation there's really only one artsd.

On that note, is anyone aware of anything that uses ONLY arts?

Since juk integrated gstreamer-support in the last release, the only thing I can think of is the internal stuff like knotify or artsdsp (that's obivous, isn't it?).
Other than that the KDE-world seems to be quite prepared for getting rid of arts.

BTW: I never really had a problem with arts. Only recently when I starting enjoying amarok, I recognized that the program didn't restart arts, when artsd was deactivated due to a pause or so. Although I might have configured arts to not be deactivated after a time of silence, I wanted to take the opportunity to try something else.
And it works like a charm indeed: even with amarok outputting to gstreamer and juk outputting to arts (at the same time) everything works without skips and I didn't need to recompile KDE ;)

[miraceti]

Hi,
I managed to setup dmix, so it is working now and mixing sound for example from aplay applications. I also use Amarok with gstreamer-alsasink out of the artsd. However, several applications still needs artsd.

Firstly, I would like to change an external player in KDE System Notifications. Now, I use artsplay, which can play wavs, oggs etc. Aplay cannot play oggs. I tried "alsaplayer -i text" but it did not work and I did not find why. In console, it works quite fine and jsut "alsaplayer" works fine too (just itds GUI is launched at each time). Can you recommend me any light player using alsa which can play wav, ogg, mp3,...?

Secondly, I would like to stop using artsdsp wrapper for applications which want to access /dev/dsp. I thought that this could be set up in ~/.asoundrc but it does not work.

My ~/.asoundrc

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pcm.ossmix {
    type dmix
    ipc_key 1024          # must be unique!
    ipc_perm 0660         # sound for everybody (at least in your group)
    slave {
        pcm "hw:0,0"      # you cannot use a "plug" device here, darn.
        period_time 0
        period_size 1024  # must be power of 2
        buffer_size 8192  # dito. It
        #format "S32_LE"
        #periods 128      # dito.
        #rate 8000        # with rate 8000 you *will* hear,
                          # if ossmix is used :)
    }
}
# bindings are cool. This says, that only the first
# two channels are to be used by dmix, which is enough for
# (most) oss apps and also lets multichannel chios work
# much faster:

bindings {
    0 0   # from 0 => to 0
    1 1   # from 1 => to 1
}

pcm.dsp0 {
    type plug
    slave.pcm "ossmix"     # use our new PCM here
}

# mixer0 like above
ctl.mixer0 {
    type hw
    card 0
}

I also found that there is no /dev/dsp0 among my devices. What is wrong?