Kubuntu 7.10 Choppy Sound Journal

As a first-time Linux user playing around with many new things over the last few days, I just thought I'd document my experience resolving choppy sound issues related to ESD/ALSA/OSS garbage, so other people in similar situations can fix their problems; I saw several other threads on this while looking for answers.

Running a fresh Kubuntu 7.10 install, and having only added new nvidia drivers in order to actually start SL, sound tends to either be choppy, non-existent, or a mix of both, also under some configurations preventing other applications from playing sound (seems like something to do with lacking ESD). This also happened to a brand new Slackware 12.0 install. By default, Kubuntu uses the package libesd-alsa0, and has no ESD, which can easily be verified by typing esd on the command line and getting yelled at. SL first tries to use ESD by default, so instead of messing with other configurations (which probably end up adding more layers of processing to the mix), I mostly tried ESD options.

Among other things attempted, pulseaudio sucked big time, and probably wasn't configured correctly, as it could never even successfully load. OSS-related configurations went nowhere fast.

On a side note, Adept is annoying and often buggy, and exploded about fifty times over the course of messing with different configurations.. At one point, trying to remove libesd0 and go back to libesd-alsa0 caused Adept to start removing EVERY PACKAGE, even KDE, before failing. It got a good number of them, so at that point I did another fresh install instead of trying to load all the packages again.

After a fresh start, here is what worked.

Opened Adept, installed the following packages:

.. libesd0
.. esound
.. esound-clients
.. esound-common

Adept should by default also remove libesd-alsa0, pulseaudio, etc., which is what you want.

Immediately after, SL had no sound. Under KDE's menus, I then went into System Settings -> Sound System -> Hardware and selected Enlightened Sound Daemon instead of Autodetect for my device. Everything worked crystal clear from then on. It seems like there may be an extremely small sound delay, but I have nothing to compare it against, and it might just be my imagination kicking in after so much frustration. Even so, it seems perfect to me. For reference, I have an Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) chipset/audio device, but I suspect this configuration will prove useful for lots of hardware.

Haha, apparently, I lied. Other applications have no sound while SL is running. Back to the drawing board.

I just run it in alsa with aoss wrapper. once I set up my .asoundrc correctly it works beutifuly. I also had to do this from a stock kubuntu install.

Everything i fixed in sl from a stock install I learned from this forum. Just make sure you read every comment and do what people suggest, no need to do anything fancy.

oh yeah. Turn off kde's sound system, or set it to an extreamly short idle timeout. It will take exclusive control of your sound card if you don't.

SL will also take exclusive control, thats why you can't use sound in anything else. It's also why I run it in a wrapper like aoss.

Realy the simplest way to get everything working in kubuntu right is to restore kubuntu to a fresh install seeing as you messed with so many packages. Setup a .asoundrc file in your home directory with correct settings for your soundcard. apt-get install alsa-oss. Set Bad_esd in the secondlife script. then just run sl from its directory with "aoss ./secondlife"

after that start anyother programs you want to use sound with with aoss.

simple.