A solution I found to my long-term sound problems

For a long time on my Mac I didn't hear SL footsteps etc. Then one day I ran it from an alternate user account (MacOS account, not SL). Bingo - all the sound worked.

Now I usually run SL like this. Boot into one account, then use fast user switching to log into a second, where I run SL. This way the sound is always perfect.

Anyone else found this ?

I discovered local sound will not work if the current mac user is not on the same volume/partition as the system.

so this works...
/Users/laukosargas

but this does not ...
/Volumes/somepartition/laukosargas

Which lead me to suspect LL are hardcoding a path somewhere. I filed a bug but it's still not fixed.

For me this is a real PITA because it means the SL cache is on my system disk which is already hard pressed for free space.

Fits in. My second account is indeed on the system disk.
Has no-one else found difficulty with the start-up account?

I have exactly the same issue. (editied to add that I too sent in a bug report).

.

They have and this work around has been posted previously. I found it back in January, not sure when the original post was.

Yes and it was probably me that posted it in the old mac forum, after a few months of whining to LL about no sound with no-one believing me! Sometimes I wonder how LL cope with the number of bug reports people must send in per day ! But it would be nice to see this one resolved.

If no one believed you, perhaps there aren't as many bug reports on the issue as there should be. I joined in December and never had the local sounds without knowing it. Another Mac user pointed out what I should have been hearing and your work around for it. That's when I searched for and found your post. I never did file a bug report as it seemed to be a known issue.

Yes! I've had the same problem. I'm very pleased that I was able to come to the Mac forum and find the topic right there.

So is the solution to link one's network-based SL directory to the local hard drive or must one create a separate account that has a home on the local hard drive?

~Ulrika~

My solution was to leave the user folder where the system creates it when you make a new user.

ie:

/Users/Laukosargas


[ quick eh ? lol ]

That won't work for me. Our home directories are on a Linux server and mounted on the MacOS machine via NFS.

I'll experiment and see if I can find a solution.

~Ulrika~

As said before, the key to getting sound to work in SL on MacOS is to have your SL application-support directory in a location matching this:

/Users/ulrika/Library/Application Support/SecondLife

Replace "ulrika" with your user name.

I was unable to do this, as our home folders are NFS mounted from a server. To fix the problem in that case, one simply has to make a symbolic link from the mounted home directory to the old original home directory. (you left it there right?) For example, the following commands issued in a terminal did the trick for me:

cp -R "/some/directory/ulrika/Library/Application Support/SecondLife" \
      "/Users/ulrika/Library/Application Support"

rm -rf "/some/directory/ulrika/Library/Application Support/SecondLife"

ln -s "/Users/ulrika/Library/Application Support/SecondLife" \
      "/some/directory/ulrika/Library/Application Support/SecondLife"

The first two commands just (a) copy over the existing application-support directory and (b) then remove it so one can put a symbolic link there. These first two commands can be done with the Finder if one prefers. The last command can only be done in a terminal.

Problem solved. I now have sound. Special thanks to my secret Unix monkey, who makes me look smart.

~Ulrika~

There are footstep sounds? Whoa.

Why not just create a link the other direction and save copying and removing the original? Does SL cry?

Also, in the past I've found NFS to be a rather poor excuse for a network filesystem when it comes to on-demand access. Latency problems forced me over to alternative filesystems. If there was a way to conveniently benchmark it, I'd be curious if moving off of the NFS share had any impact on the performance of SL, assuming you're caching over NFS. Obviously moving it from remote to local has the advantage of 40mb/sec or whatever your hard drive can do, as opposed to the average 100mbit, but testing it on one network filesystem versus another might be interesting.