Ubuntu

Sound works for one application at a time. (8.04)

Asked by hirev on 2008-05-27

I'm having issues with sound playback on two or more applications.
For example, a radio stream is playing on VLC and I try to watch a flash video on Firefox, only the sound from VLC is present.
If I exit VLC and restart Firefox to play the video it works fine.

I tried to change the Sound Preferences to ALSA for each device.
When I click the test button I get

"audiotestsrc wave=sine freq=512 ! audioconvert !
audioresample ! gconfaudiosink: Could not open audio
device for playback. Device is being used by another
application."

Thanks in advance

Question information

Language:: English Edit question

Status:: Answered

For:: Ubuntu Edit question

Assignee:: No assignee Edit question

Last query:: 2008-05-27

Last reply:: 2008-05-28

Link existing bug

Revision history for this message

Itai Molenaar (imolenaar-deactivatedaccount) said on 2008-05-27:

Here, I don't know if this will help, but I found this somewhere in the forums.

Getting more than one application to use the soundcard at the same time

* You might want to play a game and listen to music on your favorite music player at the same time. To do this successfully, you will have to use ALSA since it supports this feature the best. On all the music players I know of, you can configure the sound engine, to any module that is available.

*
The setting is usually found under something like Tools >>> Configure >>> Player Engines.

*
For games, it is a bit more tricky since there is not always a way to configure the player engine directly. Most games, however, do support the OSS. ALSA has an OSS module that allows OSS applications to use the ALSA driver.

    *
      To do this you will need the alsa-oss package
      Code:

sudo apt-get install alsa-oss

*
After doing this step, it is very easy to use alsa-oss. In the shell, you can type 'aoss' then the name of the program name you want to use with alsa-oss.

Revision history for this message

hirev (hirevtt) said on 2008-05-27:

Thanks for your quick answer.
The "aoss vlc" does work with Firefox.

I am wondering why this suddenly happened.
I was using Envy for my ATI video card driver when I installed 8.04. After a while I decided to uninstall Envy and install the video driver manually.
Then I noticed that two applications can not play sound simultaneously.