[Gllug] FC3 Sound Card Woes

[Russell Howe]

On Wed, Nov 30, 2005 at 11:02:00PM -0000, Ken Smith wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > Thanks - still looking for pointers..
> > 
> > Ken
> > 
> > 
> Must be bad (replying to own post) but is there a way I can tell if a
> process is hogging the sound card and won't let other processes send sound
> to it? I don't even know if this is utter nonsense in ALSA, but just a shot
> in the dark at what might be stopping this working. I'm tempted to throw the
> card away but somehow I suspect another card will behave just the
> same....because it seems like a problem at a layer above the device drivers
> - I hope that makes sense... How do I diagnose that?
> 
> ;-[

lsof(1) and fuser(1) can be used to see open filedescriptors, so you'll
be able to see if something's holding the device open.

/dev/dsp won't do anything if you haven't got snd-pcm-oss (OSS
emulation) built in or loaded as a module, although if you can cat to it
without error, it indicates that nothing has it open, and that it is
connected to a driver in the sound layer.

If there was no sound driver loaded, it would've given an error I think.

I think some sound drivers allow concurrent access to /dev/dsp.. so your
ability to cat might not mean nothing else has it open.

Sound on Linux is a bit weird sometimes...

-- 
Russell Howe       | Why be just another cog in the machine,
rhowe at siksai.co.uk | when you can be the spanner in the works?
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