secondlife alsa issues

On my T61p Ubuntu Gutsy system, if I force secondlife to use alsa sound doesn't work at all. I know that alsa is working because the following:

arecord -f S16_LE -r 3200 | aplay -vv

Records my voice and plays it back with a delay quite nicely. I assume that no alsa is the reason that voice doesn't work, though tracking down why alsa specifically doesn't work with secondlife, but it does with other applications is somewhat puzzling.


00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 03)

is my audio device.

Both ESD (via pulseaudio) and OSS sound work with the SL client, but no mic pickup when I'm in those modes either.

Any suggestions in debugging would be great. I'd really like to be able to get away from having an XP box solely to do voice in second life.

Thanks

I posted a fix that I've had good success with using alsa and arts in KDE in the "Choppy Sound" thread. In essence, you want to add the following line in your secondlife shell (found wherever you installed SL):

You probably should only use this if you're using arts, though (the default KDE sound system). There are some other notes in that file that you might want to look at to get some other ideas.

I've the same problem with my lenovo T61P, i've no problem with alsa sound other than SL one... waiting on next release (I actualy use Second Life 1.19.1 (1) Mar 11 2008 19:14:45 (Second Life Release Candidate)).

If i may help giving you more info on my config, just ask pls !

This is caused by FMOD, the sound library used not specifically SL. It really doesn't play nicely with ALSA for some reason.

Another possible solution is to install the alsa-oss modules. This creates an OSS compatible (/dev/dsp) sound system then run the viewer with alsa and esd disabled, BUT all the output is piped through alsa so other alsa aware applications work correctly as normal and it does not hog the sound system.

Voice is a seperate process that uses openal as a sound library. OpenAL *may* need some configuring to use asla/esd. I am not 100% sure what the lindens do here but openal will look for a /etc/openalrc then a ~/.openalrc and possibly a `pwd`/.openalrc which control which sound system is in operation, it may be that a openalrc is supplied with the voice component so it *just works* but if i recall voice wants to use esd.

Also even if you use an alsa-oss module only one application at a time can access /dev/dsp (of cause in this case other applications can still access sound via alsa).

Just to be clear if you use the alsa-oss module OR artsdsp or some other dsp wrapper you must force the viewer to use OSS and disable alsa and esd.

M2