First, further to Andrew Sackville-West's (ASW) admonition "Ken -- keep
on plugging away... you're getting closer", yes I am closer -- much
closer in fact -- but not out of the woods yet.
In view the fact that the first thing everybody advised me to do was to
disable artsd. On examination I found out that artsd is a KDE creation
which wants to monopolize all sound operations to the exclusion of all
others, even others part of the KDE empire, such as KsCD and Kaffeine.
It was then a simple matter to disable artsd as suggested by Nigel Henry
(NH) by unchecking the "Enable the sound system" box in KDE's control
centre/Sound and Multimedia/Sound system. For good measure I ran as
suggested by ASW "killall artsd", which produced a null return.
Also, as suggested by NH, I ran "cat /proc/asound/cards", which returned
the following:
0 [OPL3SA23 ]: OPL3SA2 - Yamaha OPL3-SA23
Yamaha OPL3-SA23 at 0x538, irq 5, dma 1&0
(Yes, Raffaele Morelli, I do need to educate myself about killing
processes as you suggested. Hitherto I have never felt the need to kill
anything but pesky insects. That exercise is however for another time.)
Then, as previously suggested by ASW, I ran "aplay
/usr/share/sounds/alsa/*.wav". Lo and behold, I was greeted with a
series of words: "front and centre", "keep right", and several others in
the same vein.
So, I now felt I should try play an audio CD. I inserted one in the
drive. After at least 30 seconds, a window entitled "Audio CD KDE
daemon" appeared, telling me that a new medium had been detected, and
what did I want to do? The medium was identified as an audio CD,
information I already knew.
I was then given five options: open in a new window, extract and encode
audio tracks, play, play CD with Kaffeine and do nothing. I first chose
the simplest, play, which I discovered opened the KsCD window. However,
I was unable to play. (Before I made all the changes described above, I
had tried to use noatun, with the same result.) So, I closed the KsCD
window, went back to the Audio CD KDE daemon window, chose "do nothing"
and closed that window. I was then able to eject the disk.
I then reinserted the Audio CD. When in due course I got the Audio CD
KDE daemon I chose the Kaffeine option. To my shock and amazement the
CD started to play. The sound was also accompanied by fireworks, sun
spots and similar kaleidoscopic visuals on the screen. I am sure the
additional memory required for these inhibited the smooth functioning of
the audio, as there were frequent short gaps in the audio continuity.
I then tried a telecast using Kaffeine. I got the audio but not the video.
The major lesson I have drawn from this experience it that there is a
plethora of audio (and video?) applications vying for the custom of my
laptop. One in particular (arts) seems to have the power to exclude all
the others, but then misuses this power by denying any audio (and
video?) at all.
I consequently wonder whether any other sound application is
sufficiently powerful to exclude all others, such as KsCD and noatun,
but not Kaffeine. It was with this possibility in view I included the
following two paragraphs two posts ago:
"Another factor may or may not be relevant. Two days ago I compiled
from source and installed dosemu-1.3.4. The installation was successful
in that it is allowing me to use my beloved dos based applications.
However, the last message returned by ./configure was a warning that SDL
version 1.2.0 was not found.
"I consequently installed four packages which had sdl in the name:
libsdl1.2debian, libsdl1.2debian-alsa, libsdl-net1.2 and
libsdl-sound1.2. I tried to purge these packages, but aptitude wanted
to remove a whole series of other packages including grub and icedove.
So I did not remove them. I also tried to remove them using Kpackage,
but Kpackage wanted to remove all of KDE. So these four sdl packages
remain installed. (By the way, why do aptitude and Kpackage want to
remove different apparent dependencies? But I digress.)"
Could these packages are also competing to provide sound on the laptop
and are powerful enough to prevent use of either noatun or KsCD? I ask
because I finally remembered that before I had installed dosemu-1.3.4
and these four sdl packages I had been able to listen to audio CDs with
noatun. Now I cannot.
Any opinions on this matter? In any event, as I do not seem to need
these packages for dosemu, I should remove them -- once I figure out how
to do so *without* removing key packages. I also really wonder whether
I need to keep the arts set of packages.
Regards,
Ken Heard
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