Getting hopeless on Hoary sound problems

[david]

Philippe Landau wrote:

> this is a great overview of the struggles for working sound
> in current versions of ubuntu/debian/linux, thank you Eamonn.
>
> i guess the developers must be stressed out and somewhat desperate too,
> so we do not get updates from them here about their huge efforts.
>
> congratulations for your hard-earned successes; i have no sound
> ever since i switched to hoary some 5 months ago :-)
>
> kind regards     philippe
>
> -- 
>
> Eamonn Sullivan wrote:
>
>> Forgive me a moment while I express some frustration: Getting sound to
>> work has been a bit of a nightmare in Hoary. I mean no disrespect for
>> any of the developers. I know it's hard, and apparently some people
>> have no problems. But for me, the last few weeks has been one problem
>> after another. When one thing is fixed, another breaks.
>>
>> - When Hoary was using polypaudio, everything worked perfectly, other
>> than the intro and exit sounds (I could definitely live without
>> those). But just for me. No one else who logged in after me could get
>> any sound. The wife and kids weren't amused.
>>
>> - OK, devs drop polypaudio and revert to esound. Now everyone can get
>> sound, even the intro and exit jingle. But now skype stops working,
>> after it was working perfectly under Warty and polypaudio. When I
>> start skype by itself, it hangs while trying to connect. When I start
>> skype with esddsp ("esddsp skype"), it appears to connect, but I hear
>> nothing. At least it doesn't hang.
>>
>> - Today I discovered that RealPlayer 10 doesn't work. I tried removing
>> and reinstalling. I tried Real's installer and I tried alien on the
>> rpms (both methods seem to result in identical setups). When I type
>> realplay in a shell, it just hangs before anything displays. When i
>> try strace on it, I don't see anything out of the ordinary, it just
>> hangs  in the middle of a waitpid ("waitpid(-1, ").
>>
>> - I just checked and found out that VLC doesn't work either. When I
>> try to open an AVI file I just viewed last week, I get the video fine,
>> but no audio.
>>
>> What does work: Rhythmbox still works fine (playing straight MP3s,
>> shoutcast, etc.) and I still get all the system sounds. I'm using
>> Intel motherboard sound -- Intel ICH5 AC'97.
>>
>> I just realised that there *is* a common thread among the applications
>> that don't work: OSS. RealAudio, VLC and Skype all use OSS, while the
>> stuff that does work have joined the 21st century and use Alsa or
>> esound. But if I try to choose OSS in System/Multimedia System
>> Selector (which is set to ESD at the moment) I get "Failed to
>> construct test pipeline for 'OSS - Open Sound System'
>>
>> Is anyone else also having problems with RealPlayer, Skype or VLC?
>> Anyone have a suggestion on what I can try next?
>>
>> -Eamonn
>>
>
>
I've had loads of trouble with RealPlayer on Hoary.
On a "default" array6 install it installed and worked perectly (on my 
box) - since then (and leading up to then) I've had nothing but the same 
hangs or the occasional appearing on the screen several minutes after I 
tried to invoke it.
I do hope the problem gets sorted in time for the final release of Hoary 
- (cus listening to the BBC while I'm doing stuff is kind of a 
fundamental necessity for me. The voice of sanity and all that...)

I've also had endless (similar) problems with beep-media-player & xmms. 
Rhythmbox works but it's so ugly and boxy that it hurts to look at. (IMO)

regards

David