Re: [Plib-users] no sound with torcs

[Andrew G. <a...@ga...>]

Steve,

KDE sound (artsd server) is off by definition :-)

OK, I have tried 1.8.4 examples. Both 'example' and 'playsound' don't play sound.
To be strictly: they try to play something (not like a sound is played by other
apps) during small part of second (say, 1/4) and stop playing without exiting and
without CPU eating (I must do Ctrl-C to close them). 

What is my next step?

Andrew

======= On Friday 11 March 2005 20:55, Steve Baker wrote: =======
Andrew Gaydenko wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> I have tried to play with torcs - all is fine except for there isn't
> any sound. If I understand well, torcs's sound support is provided 
> by the plib library. All other sound applications work fine (OSS/ALSA).

At one stage, Torcs was going to transition to OpenAL - did they ever do that?

Well, if it is a PLIB issue, the first step is to eliminate TORCs from the equation.

Download the PLIB examples tarball - build and run the sound library examples
on your machine.  What happens?

One common problem is that the windowing system grabs the sound drivers and
doesn't release them for other applications.  In KDE (for example) there is
a configuration option to specify how long KDE will hold onto the sound port
after it last used it.

If that's set to a large number (and I think it defaults to something like
60 seconds) then you won't get sound from an application if it's launched
within 60 seconds of KDE making a sound.   So if you have silly noises being
emitted whenever you open a window (for example) - then you're stuck without
sound.

I generally reset that number to something like 2 seconds - then everything
works OK.

If that's what's going on, you should get a message from the sound library
saying that it can't get access to the sound driver.   I forget the exact
message - but you'll know it if you see it.