Very Computer

Mozilla freezes if a page I am loading calls for a sound on it while I have
a sound application running in the background.

This happens frequently and often without warning since I like to
listen to music in the background and many common Internet pages like
dailynews.yahoo.com apparantly have some embedded sound calls.

Apparantly the problem is due to the fact that my Linux sound
configuration can only play one sound stream at a time so that Mozilla
hangs while waiting for the other stream to terminate.

Is there any way to get multiple sound streams to play simultaneously
under Linux? (BTW Windoze seems to have no problem combining multiple
sound streams.)

This seems like a very basic sound requirement since people often have
some music streaming while still wanting/needing sound on their
computers.

I am running RH8.0/Linux 2.4.20 using Alsa 0.9.0 for sound and Mozilla
1.2.1 as my browser. My sound hardware is an integrated ADI AD1980
AC'97 audio codec on my ASUS P4PE motherboard.

Thanks,
Jeff

Quote:> Mozilla freezes if a page I am loading calls for a sound on it while I have
> a sound application running in the background.

Quote:> Apparantly the problem is due to the fact that my Linux sound
> configuration can only play one sound stream at a time so that Mozilla

Quote:> I am running RH8.0/Linux 2.4.20 using Alsa 0.9.0 for sound and Mozilla
> 1.2.1 as my browser. My sound hardware is an integrated ADI AD1980
> AC'97 audio codec on my ASUS P4PE motherboard.

Peter

http://www.tux.org/~ricdude/EsounD.html

Hanging was due to Macromedia Flash *on yahoo. I had an older
version of the Flash plug-in (version 5) that was buggy. This bug
caused hangs on pages like yahoo news even when there was no obvious
user-hearable sound. Upgrading to the latest Flash-plugin (6.0) fixed
the problem with Mozilla* (even without using arts/esd since
the page didn't really have sound).

On the other hand esd (which was already running for me under Gnome)
is indeed the right solution for other multi-stream sound
conflicts. Arts would presumably be an equivalent solution though my
understanding is that esd is the default for gnome while arts is more
commonly used with esd.

Any major pros/cons of arts vs. esd that I should be thinking about?

Jeff