[CS-FSLUG] Re: Firefox sound problem...It was aRts!

[Ed Hurst]

On Tue, 8 Mar 2005, David M wrote:

> On Tuesday 08 March 2005 5:30 am, timbrown at ichristian.com wrote:
>> Thanks Alvin...That did it! now if I can only remember why or when I turned
>> on Arts!
>
> I was following this thread because I'm having the same problem. I tried
> switching to the OSS sound system, but that didn't help my problem with
> firefox.

Okay, maybe I'm really missing something obvious, so bear with me. I am
hardly an expert compared to others on this list and I've been
hesitant to comment on this thread.

Arts will hog the sound system; it's never played nice with others,
unlike, say esound. It will drop it's control after an interval set by
the user somewhere in the config menus of Control Center. Default is 5
seconds, IIRC. For any app to get a piece of the sound system, it has
be launced under the 'artsdsp $APP' formula. This was a big deal
discussed much back when RealPlayer became a common part of distros
that made use of KDE2. People were advised to edit the menus and icon
properties to launch every sound-using app with that formula.

Only recently has KDE allowed you to choose another sound server
besides aRTs, but then too many KDE apps won't do sound. I've read some
technical stuff way over my head explaining how wonderful aRTs' design
concept was, but I'm not impressed.

Given that my own computer sound-system woes are so frequent, and KDE
so hideously buggy when I use it, I've not spent much time with either
lately. :-)

Ed Hurst
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