Sound
From Arnout Engelen
Contents |
[edit] Troubleshooting
When using Debian/Ubuntu, https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DebuggingSoundProblems is rather good. Too bad such pages are distribution-specific...
[edit] Soundcard in use
If the soundcard is reported to be in use, you can check what application is using it by:
lsof | grep /dev/dsp lsof | grep /dev/snd
[edit] by ARTS
artsd is started automatically by (kde) applications, and used to irritatingly lock my soundcard for me. I fixed this by configuring artsd to use ALSA with 'kcontrol' - I guess it defaulted to OSS (?).
[edit] No sound playing / error opening device
[edit] Are you outputting to the right device?
For Alsa, the recognised cards are listed in /proc/asound/cards.
By default, most applications write to card0. If this happens to be some other device (like an USB MIDI keyboard), you'll have to configure them to write to another card instead, or modify the order in which the cards are recognised.
The latter can be done by adding the following to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base:
options snd-usb-audio index=1
which makes sure the usb audio device (my midi keyboard) is loaded as card 1.
