Sound freezes everywhere except PS

[Spitfire]

Hi all

First of all: My PlaneShift client works perfectly!
Only issue I got: My system sound freezes completly when starting PlaneShift. So for PS everything is fine, but I can't listen to music (or anything) else anymore.
Is PlaneShift based on OSS? As I know OSS has only one channel, and will block everything else.

The strange thing: If I chat with an instantmessenger which normaly plays some sound, I will receive all these sounds after closing PS at one time (very loud then).

Does someone else have this issue or has an idea what this could be?

Thank you in advance!

Daniel

EDIT: My system: Kubuntu feisty default installation, soundcard: AC'97

[Induane]

Sounds to me like you have a cheap audio card. Even with alsa if your card doesn't support hardware mixing then it can cause problems when you load PS.  I know you can enable software mixing to get around this but I forget how.  I'll have a look around later when I have more time though and see if I can remember the procedure (or find it on google).

Update:  Enabling software mixing is easier than I thought now.  It used to be buried in a config file but is now accessible through the gui.


Click on the menu Systems and go   Preferences ---->  Sound

Once there you should see a screen like this:



One of the tabs should be labeled "Sounds".  Select that tab and you should see the following:



Make certain that "Enable Software Sound Mixing" checkbox is checked.  If you still have the same problem or that checkbox is already checked, fling another post this way and we'll see what we can come up with.

Update Update:  I'm not sure where this is in the KDE menu system, but you should be able to at least find something similar.  I'll see if I can find any KDE docs on this.

[Spitfire]

Thank you very much for this excellent guide! I use KDE, but your description was enough to find this link via google.
I did what they told to do under "Software Mixing" but it doesn't work for me. The sound still works only for PS or all other programs.

Any other suggestion?

[Spitfire]

I also tried this, but didn't help. http://wiki.unixboard.de/index.php/Howto:Sound_mit_mehreren_Programmen
It's German, but you can see the code in the file...

[Induane]

The next step is to find out if you are using alsa or oss.  Also you could try installing oss emulation for alsa, this might let some other more interesting things be tried later:

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sudo apt-get install alsa-oss

[Spitfire]

Well, I'm using ALSA. I run Teampeak 2 through aoss (alsa-oss) and it works fine. In my control center ALSA is the only option chosen. (Not AUTO or something else)
But "aoss /usr/local/PlaneShift/psclient" doesn't change anything to the issue. Still frozen system sound.

Do you know another way to activate software mixing? Maybe directly in some KDE control menu? I'm not sure, but I think these two tutorials didn't do what they should.

Thank you!

[Spitfire]

Version .019 fixed for me. God bless the developers. 

[Drahlian]

My sound in PS works just fine... for about 5 or 10 minutes, then PS sounds stop until I log in again. This problem was in 3.018 and 3.019.

Ubuntu 7.04, 32 bit.

-Drahlian

[Induane]

try opening your psclient.cfg file in a text editor.  Then add on an empty line the following:

Code: [Select]

SndSys.Driver.ALSA.SoundBufferms = 150
See if that clears it up.  If not try enabling OSS sound instead (you may need to delete the alsa driver line which looks like this:

Code: [Select]

SndSys.Driver = crystalspace.sndsys.software.driver.oss
and replace with this:

Code: [Select]

SndSys.Driver = crystalspace.sndsys.software.driver.oss
After doing that remove the soundbufferms line you added above and replace with this line:

Code: [Select]

SndSys.Driver.oss.SoundBufferms = 150
I'd try option 1 first, but if that doesn't work, try option 2.