Problems with sound

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joshg678
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Problems with sound

Post by joshg678 »

Hi, thanks for reading into my topic.

I just installed BZflag from source using bzflag-2.0.4.20050930.tar.bz2

Install went fine, no problems, game runs except for one thing, the sound does not work right.

When the sound plays, it seems as its really slow, and scratchy. SO i went into the sound settings, seeing nothign in the driver, and device. So i found the driver and the location of my sound driver.
driver: snd-via82xx
device: /dev/dsp

After putting in those values, the sound no longer works at all, if i remove these items, it goes back to where it was. (after every change i did restart bzflag)

Any ideas on what i can do to fix, i can play the game without sound, but i'de like the sound.
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Re: Problems with sound

Post by Ice Wewe »

joshg678 wrote:Hi, thanks for reading into my topic.

I just installed BZflag from source using bzflag-2.0.4.20050930.tar.bz2

Install went fine, no problems, game runs except for one thing, the sound does not work right.

When the sound plays, it seems as its really slow, and scratchy. SO i went into the sound settings, seeing nothign in the driver, and device. So i found the driver and the location of my sound driver.
driver: snd-via82xx
device: /dev/dsp

After putting in those values, the sound no longer works at all, if i remove these items, it goes back to where it was. (after every change i did restart bzflag)

Any ideas on what i can do to fix, i can play the game without sound, but i'de like the sound.
Are you running KDE? Do you have xmms running?
Do you have firefox running?
Do you have aMSN/Gaim running?
Do you have a sound editor running?
Do you have a video editor running?
Do you have nautilus running?

Only one application is allowed to access the sound card at one time, you'll have to change /dev/dsp to a soft-mixer to have multiple apps use it at the same time.


I actually play without sound, I find them drab, and boring. I'd much rather listen to my music in xmms than bzflag noises. Just my personal preference.
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joshg678
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Post by joshg678 »

Are you running KDE? No, gnome
Do you have xmms running? No
Do you have firefox running? No (but i love it)
Do you have aMSN/Gaim running? No
Do you have a sound editor running? No
Do you have a video editor running? No
Do you have nautilus running? No

I am runningn FC4, forgot to mention that.
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Post by Ice Wewe »

joshg678 wrote:Are you running KDE? No, gnome
Do you have xmms running? No
Do you have firefox running? No (but i love it)
Do you have aMSN/Gaim running? No
Do you have a sound editor running? No
Do you have a video editor running? No
Do you have nautilus running? No

I am runningn FC4, forgot to mention that.
Does your sound work in the normal system?
Are you using arts as a sound system?
It is possible that Gnome is blocking the soundcard, do you have icewm on the machine?

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Post by joshg678 »

the sound card works fine normally, xmms works great, vmware also has sound that works in gues systems.

I don't know what arts is, or icewm.
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Post by Ice Wewe »

joshg678 wrote:the sound card works fine normally, xmms works great, vmware also has sound that works in gues systems.

I don't know what arts is, or icewm.

ps ax | grep arts

or

ps ax | grep artsd

See if its running, if it is, do: -15 <pid id>

Also, if vmware is running, that will take up the soundcard.
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Post by joshg678 »

nothing was running.

Well it works now, what i did was restart the computer, must have forgotten to do that after i installed BZflag

Well dumb moment over, thanks for the help.
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Post by Ice Wewe »

joshg678 wrote:nothing was running.

Well it works now, what i did was restart the computer, must have forgotten to do that after i installed BZflag

Well dumb moment over, thanks for the help.

Restart? That is a Windows thing. It is also foreign to Linux. Unless you're upgrading the kernel, there is no need to reboot in Linux. Hence why my dad's PDA has over 450 days of uptime on it. :lol:
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Post by joshg678 »

but the system takes like 30 seconds to restart because of my 10,000 RPM drive.
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Post by Ice Wewe »

joshg678 wrote:but the system takes like 30 seconds to restart because of my 10,000 RPM drive.
That's not the point.
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Post by kingofnerds »

ALSA is also another popular software sound mixer it is the one I perfer
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Post by Ice Wewe »

kingofnerds wrote:ALSA is also another popular software sound mixer it is the one I perfer

You can adjust sound levels in alsa from a terminal using 'alsamixer'. I quite like that too. My xmms uses the OSS to Alsa bridge.
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Post by kingofnerds »

basically that is alsa emulating oss so that more programs can use it.
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Re: Problems with sound

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joshg678 wrote: When the sound plays, it seems as its really slow, and scratchy. SO i went into the sound settings, seeing nothign in the driver, and device. So i found the driver and the location of my sound driver.
driver: snd-via82xx
device: /dev/dsp
I have a VIA82xx like you, and run Linux. Normally, if another app is using my sound device when I start BZ, I don't I get any sound at all, let alone a distorted one. The audio system is marked Unavailable in the game menu, and an error is logged to the (non-bz) console. However, I have had plenty of sample rate problems with BZ that produce sounds of much shorter duration and higher pitch than normal - I think that's similar to what you're describing. Part of it probably stems from the fact that BZ's wav data files are recorded at 22050HZ instead of 44100 or 48000.

I'm not quite sure what BZ does by default when you leave Driver and Device empty, but if you were to fill them in you would want to set Driver to "alsa" and Device to an alsa pcm name, such as "default", or "plughw:0,0" (all minus the quotes). To anyone who's alsa savy out there, know that I've had a particularly hard time trying to use dmix with bzflag on my sound card.

Actually, here are my sound entries in my config file, which seem to work well and may do you some good if you run into this again. You have to type this into the config file directly, and not in the menu, due to length restrictions.

Code: Select all

set audioDevice plug:{SLAVE="plughw:0,0",RATE=48000}
set audioDriver alsa
Although it's possible - probably likely - that that's an overcomplicated entry. It's a byproduct of some experimentation I was doing. You can try this one too:

Code: Select all

set audioDevice plughw:0,0
set audioDriver alsa
joshg678 wrote: Well it works now, what i did was restart the computer, must have forgotten to do that after i installed BZflag
Restarting the computer shouldn't be necessary in theory. It might have just gotten rid of whatever was hogging the sound in the first place, if that was indeed the problem. You can also try restarting the sound system itself without rebooting, by running as root "/etc/init.d/alsasound reload". The actual location of that script on your distro may vary; I'm running Suse 10.x.
Ice Wewe wrote: Restart? That is a Windows thing. It is also foreign to Linux. Unless you're upgrading the kernel, there is no need to reboot in Linux. Hence why my dad's PDA has over 450 days of uptime on it.
Notice how I said "in theory" above. I've gotten my share of gaming related system lockups. I've also found that running bzflag under incorrect sound settings can cause bzflag to leave behind a defunct process when you exit, which somehow ties up the entire sound system and prevents you from unloading the sound modules until a reboot. That's something to bear in mind if you suddenly lose access to the sound device after playing - just do a quick "ps aux | grep bz" to see if that's the culprit.
Last edited by Workaphobia on Sat Dec 17, 2005 7:47 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Problems with sound

Post by Workaphobia »

Double post, sorry.
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Post by The Vaxorcist »

In gnome, it should be using the esd software mixer. Try setting the driver to esd
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Re: Problems with sound

Post by Ice Wewe »

Workaphobia wrote:
joshg678 wrote: When the sound plays, it seems as its really slow, and scratchy. SO i went into the sound settings, seeing nothign in the driver, and device. So i found the driver and the location of my sound driver.
driver: snd-via82xx
device: /dev/dsp
I have a VIA82xx like you, and run Linux. Normally, if another app is using my sound device when I start BZ, I don't I get any sound at all, let alone a distorted one. The audio system is marked Unavailable in the game menu, and an error is logged to the (non-bz) console. However, I have had plenty of sample rate problems with BZ that produce sounds of much shorter duration and higher pitch than normal - I think that's similar to what you're describing. Part of it probably stems from the fact that BZ's wav data files are recorded at 22050HZ instead of 44100 or 48000.

I'm not quite sure what BZ does by default when you leave Driver and Device empty, but if you were to fill them in you would want to set Driver to "alsa" and Device to an alsa pcm name, such as "default", or "plughw:0,0" (all minus the quotes). To anyone who's alsa savy out there, know that I've had a particularly hard time trying to use dmix with bzflag on my sound card.

Actually, here are my sound entries in my config file, which seem to work well and may do you some good if you run into this again. You have to type this into the config file directly, and not in the menu, due to length restrictions.

Code: Select all

set audioDevice plug:{SLAVE="plughw:0,0",RATE=48000}
set audioDriver alsa
Although it's possible - probably likely - that that's an overcomplicated entry. It's a byproduct of some experimentation I was doing. You can try this one too:

Code: Select all

set audioDevice plughw:0,0
set audioDriver alsa
joshg678 wrote: Well it works now, what i did was restart the computer, must have forgotten to do that after i installed BZflag
Restarting the computer shouldn't be necessary in theory. It might have just gotten rid of whatever was hogging the sound in the first place, if that was indeed the problem. You can also try restarting the sound system itself without rebooting, by running as root "/etc/init.d/alsasound reload". The actual location of that script on your distro may vary; I'm running Suse 10.x.
Ice Wewe wrote: Restart? That is a Windows thing. It is also foreign to Linux. Unless you're upgrading the kernel, there is no need to reboot in Linux. Hence why my dad's PDA has over 450 days of uptime on it.
Notice how I said "in theory" above. I've gotten my share of gaming related system lockups. I've also found that running bzflag under incorrect sound settings can cause bzflag to leave behind a defunct process when you exit, which somehow ties up the entire sound system and prevents you from unloading the sound modules until a reboot. That's something to bear in mind if you suddenly lose access to the sound device after playing - just do a quick "ps aux | grep bz" to see if that's the culprit.

Yea, my BZFlag by default uses the OSS to Alsa bridge. Nothing I know of in my system uses Alsa directly, except Audacity. It used to be when I started BZFlag, and had xmms running, it would switch to using Alsa as a sound device, and thus I had two things outputting sound. One surprising thing about this was, it made all the BZFlag sounds sound cooler! I was going to try and record it, but I didn't have another computer that could record sound, at the time, and audacity requires Alsa, which was in use. *sigh So, if you want, I can flip it into that mode, now that I have a 15" PowerBook that can record sound, and you can get to hear shots that sound like their being shot through a silencer. Laser and shockwave are also cool.
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Post by joshg678 »

One thing i noticed, is when i restarted the system, and ran the game, it worked fine. today after a fresh reboot, i checked some mail in Firefox, ran vmware (so i can do some of those darn windows tasks) and then closed all of those programs, i was having the same problem with the sound in bz flag. I have not experenced this problem anywhere else before.

Now just gotta find the bxflag.conf file.
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