SL takes over sound device

Hello,

I've noticed that when I'm running SL it takes over my sound device.

This doesn't make any sense because sound "doesn't work" with the Linux client.

Thus I wanted to use SLStream:
hxxp://stux.wikiinfo.org/Tools

However when Totem launches to play audio it tells me that the device is busy.

Is there a way I can do one of these?:

a) Make the SL client use a sound server instead of p0wning my sound device
b) Disable sound entirely in SL (muting the audio in the prefs doesn't do it)

This might be completely unrelated but I had a similar problem with World of Warcraft running under WINE. All I did was start up my (Skype) call before starting WoW.

Well, Sound *does* work with the Linux client for months now (ESD (default), ALSA or OSS). You might want to read through past postings on this forum to find out about potential problems with sound.

Yeah, we haven't needed to use slstream for months...the in-game music streamer works just fine, as does all other sound.

It also only takes over the audio device if you're using ALSA. Try the OSS or ESD module which can cooperatively share the audio device (unless you have a simplex sound card, then only ESD will share)

ALSA won't block if it's dmix plugin is loaded.
OSS always will block on most devices except the Soundblaster Live, but then I belive they ask to use ALSA anyway.
ESD will share if folks use ESD for everything.

I've been using artsd with success recently. To get SL to play nice, I've modified the secondlife shell script to launch the do-not-directly-run-second-life-bin binary via artsdsp, which intercepts the calls to /dev/dsp and pipes them to artsd. It works, I'd say, around 90% of the time. For some odd reason every once in a blue moon I won't get any sound from Second Life, but usually relaunching fixes it. But those times I do get sound in SL, I can still use xmms, vlc, amarok, just to name a few.

I can get sound to work, but the audio breaks up; it starts and stops about every 1/3rd of a second. Any idea how to fix this?

Nevermind, I think it was my sound device.

I was using the onboard Sigmatel device. When I put in my Audigy 2 and disabled the Sigmatel device it started working as expected.

Is there any way to play the music of one area while you are in another area?

My client froze today and when I control alt backspaced (sloppy I know lol) to relog, the music from the area I was in continued to play (even when logged out of desktop). It continued to play after I logged onto my desktop and once I logged back into Second life it was playing everywhere I went. If I turned on the music of the area I was in it would play it overtop of the other area's musc.

Is there any way to accomplish this on purpose? I liked it hehe

Very ingenious solution, Compulov! I tried aoss (ALSA's oss emulator) and padsp (PulseAudio's oss emulator) to no avail, but artsdsp works. I'm running arts on top of pulseaudio so I have esd support, and pulseaudio on top of dmix. Still very low latency everywhere

Thanks,

-Tiyuk