System beep occupies sound card for 60 seconds

**SO(3)** · 10-06-2005

After system beeps, I am not able to play audio for 60 seconds. MPlayer gives me the following when I attempt to play music within a minute of beep:

Code:

audio_setup&#58; Can't open audio device /dev/dsp&#58; Device or resource busy
alsa-init&#58; got device=0, subdevice=0
alsa-init&#58; 1 soundcard found, using&#58; default

The card may not be occupied for 60 seconds, maybe that is the "attempt period" of ALSA or my music players?

I thought about aliasing mplayer with something like

Code:

pkill -x <somthing blocking sound> & mplayer

but I don't know what to kill and there is probably a better solution. Any suggestions would be great.

**jaboua** · 10-06-2005

Which DE are you using? It's probably arts (kde) or esound (gnome) taking over the sound device, this can either be solved with turning down the time before arts deactivates itself in kcontrol (kde), or using dmix. This page seems to explain dmix well:
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_ALSA_so...he_dmix_device

if not, try googling it

**SO(3)** · 10-06-2005

Thanks Jaboua. I use IceWM, but I'll run KDE to see if arts takes over after beeps and for how long. It's possible that arts could also be the problem in IceWM right (Gnome isn't installed)? Your link was pretty dense, but I'll work through it. I'll post anything I find.

**jaboua** · 10-06-2005

If you run a KDE app which beeps, then aRts would usually take over, no matter which de/wm you are using.

**SO(3)** · 10-12-2005

I generally got the beeps while working in Konsole. I took a couple measures based on your suggestions and it is now fixed. This is what I did:

1) Started KDE to get its all-in-one configuration interface. Under "Sound" in "Sound System" under the "Hardware" tab, I selected OSS rather than ALSA for the sound system (I read this suggestion somewhere, but otherwise had no basis for this choice). Under the "General" tab, I minimized the "Auto-Suspend" time (1 sec., I didn't bother with 0 sec. because it sounds like a crash request). Alsamixer still works for controlling the various volumes.

2) I switched to Eterm -- it hasn't given me a single beep (e.g. from tabbing to complete a file name that isn't there).

Konsole still beeps, but it only usurps the sound system for 1 second.

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System beep occupies sound card for 60 seconds

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