[Scottish] sounds blues

[Colin McKinnon]

Hi all,

I wonder if anyone can help with my current problems. My main box is currently 
running SuSE9.3 and up until recently the only time I wanted it to make 
noises, amarok, xmms and xine were all I needed and worked quite well.

Recently I've wanted to get started using other stuff but....I can't get 
anything else to work!

I thought it was setup to run ALSA, if I start up in runlevel 3 speaker-test 
works OK.

If I start up in 5 and login to a KDE desktop, amarok works (but it always 
starts up artsd which runs at s illy priority and eats all my CPU). If I kill 
off artsd, I get noises from speaker-test.

I'm trying to rosegarden working (a Midi Sequencer) and it is configured to 
talk to Alsa. If artsd is running when it starts, it seems happy enough - but 
no sound. If I start it with artsd NOT running, it complains "No soundcard 
available or sound support not configured yet...". Seems to start up 
something called jackd (not a balding comedian from london).

KMid never complains - and looks as if it is playing my midi files regardless 
of whether artsd is running or not. Doesn't make any noise though. It says 
its using alsa.

Running QAmix when XMMS or Amarok are blasting, the volume controls don't have 
any effect, but the PCM mute turns off the sound (but master mute doesn't).

Anybody got a clue what's going on here? Or better, how I should fix it?

(BTW its a crappy onboard sound chipset it's only described as 'Onboard 5.1 
Channel, AC97 Audio Codec' but it only provides line in / line out / mic 
connectors)

TIA,

Colin