Sound Issues

[corinth]

I'm using suse 9.1 pro, and the sound seems to be really messed up. I've only been able to get it to work a few times, once it seemed to work fine, and the other times it skipped, almost like I was playing a scratched CD. Anyone else had the same problem, and anyone know how to fix it?

[oldcpu]

I'm using suse 9.1 pro, and the sound seems to be really messed up. I've only been able to get it to work a few times, once it seemed to work fine, and the other times it skipped, almost like I was playing a scratched CD. Anyone else had the same problem, and anyone know how to fix it?

I now use SuSE-9.3 pro, and I have no sound issues. Sound works reliably, and its great.

When I used to use SuSE-9.1 pro, I did notice there were a number of older misbehaved apps, which would not release the audio driver after they were finished. Which meant that sometimes audio would not work. In those cases I either had to find the part of the app causing the problem (and sometimes kill it manually via bash shell "kill -9 app-id"), or a simple 2-minute re-install of the audio driver. .... I know, I know ... re-installing the audio driver is taking a sludge hammer to kill a fly, but it was quick to do (less than 2 minutes) and it always worked.

I have never encountered the "scratchy" sound you mention.

[AlexK]

hmm, I have encountered this kind of scratchy and low quality sound in SuSE 9.2, but not in 9.3. The work-around i found for 9.2 was to launch the KDE control center -> Sound and Multimedia -> Sound System -> Hardware tab. Here I selected OSS as the sound system and volia, no more scratchy, low quality sound.

[corinth]

Alright, selecting OSS as the sound made it work. But now I have another problem, the sound is really soft. Any help?

[AlexK]

try increasing the volume on the mixer, or your speakers, or the volume control of the program you are using to play the file.

[corinth]

Done, done, and done. Still too quiet.

[AlexK]

is there good connection between speaker and sound card? I don't know if it will help, but try running alsamixer and increase the volumes there. It might help.

[Ethyriel]

I don't think alsamixer will do him much good now that he's fallen back on OSS/Free.
Does the KDE mixer have a toggle for OSS/Alsa? If not, you should be able to get aumix or some equivalent fairly easily from Suse's repositories.

[corinth]

All fixed! I used Kmix, and I was able to raise a setting I didn't see in the others. Sound is working great now, thanks for all your help.