Linux 2.6 kernel and sound problems

[russo]

I still have out of sync problems with sound on most if not all of my lucas arts games.
There must be a setting somewhere I can adjust?
Anyone with simular issues.

[eriktorbjorn]

I still have out of sync problems with sound on most if not all of my lucas arts games.
There must be a setting somewhere I can adjust?
Anyone with simular issues.

One thing I'm told can cause the sound to lag behind is if it's is played through one of those sound server things, like ESD or artsd. (My sound card already allows several applications to use it at the same time, so I never had any reason to use either of them.)

[russo]

I donot think I am running those under gnome. I run doom3 and other games without a issue.
I am on Fedora 2 now. I was runnig scummvm on Redhat 8 before with no issues. I am using creative live sound card.

[eriktorbjorn]

I donot think I am running those under gnome. I run doom3 and other games without a issue.
I am on Fedora 2 now. I was runnig scummvm on Redhat 8 before with no issues. I am using creative live sound card.

My sound card is a SoundBlaster Live! too, and I recently upgraded to a 2.6 Linux kernel. I haven't noticed any audio sync problems. Do you have any specific examples? (E.g. the way the sound is handled in the CD version of Loom the sync between audio and video is never going to be more than acceptable at most.)

[russo]

Hmmmm....

I would like to first say that I really like the work you guys do. I have all the Lucas arts games and it is great to play them on my Linux box. The out-of-sync problem is on all the talkies that I have tested. Day of the Tentacle,SamnMax, Full Throttle .... Maybe I have a service that is running and I need to turn off? I have Fedora 2 on a P4 2mega herz. One gig of memory.
I should mention that I compile scummvm then run make install. I don't know if there are any added switches I could use when compiling?

Thanks for the help!

Mike

[eriktorbjorn]

The out-of-sync problem is on all the talkies that I have tested. Day of the Tentacle,SamnMax, Full Throttle .... Maybe I have a service that is running and I need to turn off?

I guess you could look for a process called "esd" or "artsd" or something like that. Or possibly - I have not tried this - it might help to explicitly tell SDL which audio driver to use.

I have Fedora 2 on a P4 2mega herz. One gig of memory.

I run Debian on a 450 MHz P3, with 256 MB of memory, so at least your computer should be more than fast enough.

I should mention that I compile scummvm then run make install. I don't know if there are any added switches I could use when compiling?

None that I can think of, at least. Except for MIDI, ScummVM uses SDL for audio, not caring exactly how it's done.

[russo]

I killed both esd and artsd . Do I even need theses running? Is there away to stop them from starting? Everything works great when I kill them
I also have Kyrandia Book 2 and 3. Any chance they will be supported in the future?

Thanks again,
Mike

[eriktorbjorn]

I killed both esd and artsd . Do I even need theses running? Is there away to stop them from starting? Everything works great when I kill them
I also have Kyrandia Book 2 and 3. Any chance they will be supported in the future?

Thanks again,
Mike

I'm not sure exactly what services they provide. I thought the main purpose of them was to ensure that several applications can use sound simultaneously and the SoundBlaster Live! driver always allowed that anyway, so I simply didn't install those packages.

I don't know if or how this affects Gnome or KDE though. I don't run those fancy desktop environments myself (though I do keep the libraries installed so that I can use the applications written for them).

As for Kyra 2 and 3 support, your guess is as good as mine. I've heard Kyra 2 is similar to Kyra 1 internally, so I'm hopeful. I don't know about Kyra 3. Either way, I doubt much will happen until Kyra 1 is fully supported.

[Jimbob]

I know the esd program is the Enlightenment Sound Daemon, more info here or possibly here. From memory a few Linux programs use it for sound output ... especially Enlightenment based programs.

I'm not too sure what artsd is .... I guess a quick search on Google will provide an answer, and, believe it or not, it's yet another sound daemon (see here).

[dirtyhairy]

Jupp, esd and artsd are sound daemons, meaning programs can connect to them to output sound instead of directly connecting to the hardware via ALSA or OSS.
They provide software mixing (alsa also provides support for effect plugins), but can result in lagging sound. Simply killing alsad and esd may be troublesome, since several programs restart them if they want to play sound. Instead, you can try telling SDL to use ALSA directly via SDL_AUDIODRIVER=alsa (assuming your system uses ALSA). If this doesn't work, your sound hardware most likely doesn't support playback of several voices at once. If this is the case, you can use the ALSA dmix plugin to provide software mixing - just google for "dmix"
If your system uses OSS, than this will not work; you will really have to kill alsad and esd every time you start SCUMMVM.
I also don't know if it is able to setup ALSA in a way that allows OSS and ALSA playback at once, so you will most likely have to setup arts to use ALSA (you can do this in the KDE settings). This might be a problem with esd which doesn't support ALSA directly afaik, but I don't know of any programs that really require esd for sound output (I suspect your esd is started by artsd)