Distorted sound in KDE (Solved)

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khyron · Post by **khyron** » Sat Jun 18, 2005 6:01 pm

After spending a few weeks downloading drivers, updating the kernel, and generally screaming and yelling at it, I finally got Gentoo to play sounds.

When I play songs using madplay, they sound fine. They're clear and great.

When I open up KDE, though, everything goes to hell. All sounds, from the intro jingle to any songs I listen to, have weird clicking and distortion.

I have no idea if this is related, but I thought I'd toss this out too in case it is. Changing the sound driver in any way, seems to lock up KDE, sometimes the entire system. (IE : Changing from Autodetect to ALSA, or from ALSA back to autodetect, or from OSS to ALSA, etc).

I am a complete and total linux nublet. I've blundered my way this far, but I have no idea what could be causing this. I've been hearing about dmix and kmix and this and that and I have no idea what to do. Please help this stupid little newbie to get sounds working properly in KDE

(Since madplay seems to play the sounds just fine, I figured that it wasn't a hardware issue and thus best posted here)

alsuren · Post by **alsuren** » Sat Jun 18, 2005 6:37 pm

I don't know if this is gonna be useful, but on my Nvidia NF4 motherboard, the sound goes fuzzy if I have PCM too loud (in KMix) even if I have the other controls low. Try messing with your mixer levels and seeing what happens. *shrug* I also noticed that my sound screws itself sometimes when I'm playing videos and not using the hardware accelerated engine, so it might be a processor speed thing (but I doubt it if you're only running KDE and the sound is always buggered)

Try it and see, then post back and see if anyone else can help (include more details about your sound card etc. if you can)

jmja89 · Post by **jmja89** » Sat Jun 18, 2005 8:02 pm

Is your KDE compiled with or without aRts support? (If you didn't have the -arts USE flag it has arts). If you are using aRts try doing

Code: Select all

artsplay <musicfile>

if that also produces this distortion then it is arts causing the problems. Also, are the files you are testing .ogg .mp3 or .wav files (or other)?

khyron · Post by **khyron** » Sat Jun 18, 2005 10:17 pm

jmja89 wrote:Is your KDE compiled with or without aRts support? (If you didn't have the -arts USE flag it has arts). If you are using aRts try doing
Code: Select all
artsplay <musicfile>
if that also produces this distortion then it is arts causing the problems. Also, are the files you are testing .ogg .mp3 or .wav files (or other)?

Originally, it was compiled without aRts support... since it originally wasn't planned to have a sound card

But the plan changed, so...

I just tried doing 'artsplay test.mp3' and I got the distortion there. So it appears to be arts causing the problem.

It happens with all sounds in KDE, from the openning sounds to any music files.

jmja89 · Post by **jmja89** » Sat Jun 18, 2005 11:16 pm

So it was compiled without arts, and then arts was added? Did you recompil kdelibs after adding arts?

khyron · Post by **khyron** » Sun Jun 19, 2005 12:03 am

jmja89 wrote:So it was compiled without arts, and then arts was added? Did you recompil kdelibs after adding arts?

I didn't know to =/

Would it help to just unmerge KDE, then emerge it again?

jmja89 · Post by **jmja89** » Sun Jun 19, 2005 12:59 am

yeah that would work, but it will take a looooooong time

khyron · Post by **khyron** » Sun Jun 19, 2005 1:38 am

Time is on my side

If it works, then I don't mind doing it.

My question is this : If artsplay gives me distorted sound while I'm in the command prompt, will removing and reinstalling KDE alone work, or do I need to re-emerge arts as well?

fiberoptix · Post by **fiberoptix** » Sun Jun 19, 2005 6:05 am

un emergeing kde wont do it, ebuild will not take the dependencies with it. You will only be unmergind kde base. You can however remerge arts ans see if that works. First off put arts in your make.conf file, then do a emerge --newuse arts. That will recompile arts (check to make sure alsa is in your make.conf as well as -oss if your not using oss). If arts is still borked unmerge it and add -arts to make.conf and remerge kde

Slavo · Post by **Slavo** » Sun Jun 19, 2005 3:02 pm

try to go to Control Center ---> Sound and Multimedia ---> Sound System and there in window try to reduce Sound Buffer (I use arts only for skype - and it works flawless with value 40 miliseconds - at 200ms it was terribly distorted)

khyron · Post by **khyron** » Sun Jun 19, 2005 3:42 pm

Slavo wrote:try to go to Control Center ---> Sound and Multimedia ---> Sound System and there in window try to reduce Sound Buffer (I use arts only for skype - and it works flawless with value 40 miliseconds - at 200ms it was terribly distorted)

I figured this was the easiest of the solutions to try out... and it worked!

Thanks a million, that was exactly the kind of fix I was looking for

Slavo · Post by **Slavo** » Sun Jun 19, 2005 3:52 pm

youre welcome - please edit your first post and add (Solved) to title of it

Distorted sound in KDE (Solved)

Distorted sound in KDE (Solved)

maybe this will help

Re: maybe this will help