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Contention for Sound Card in Ubuntu

Problem:

Quite often with Ubuntu and a few other distros in Linux, I have had problems with programs not being able to share the sound card. For example, once Firefox gets a hold of my sound card, it would not give it up even when it is not using it. That means if XMMS wanted to access the sound card, it will fail because Firefox has a lock on the sound device.

The way I would deal with this problem is simply restarting the sound daemons (/etc/init.d/alsa-utils or /etc/init.d/esound ...) and hope that resolves the issue. Now might be the time to seek a more scientific solution.

Solution:

For most sound cards, hardware mixing only allows for only one program to have an exclusive lock over the sound device. To enable more than one program to access the sound card, a layer of virtual/software sound mixing is needed. KDE based distros like Kubuntu use aRts for audio management, but aRts has been known to be very buggy when dealing with non-KDE applications. The more popular and reliable option for virtual sound mixing and audio management is ALSA. So,checking your system sound settings and the audio output component of individual applications and insuring that they all use ALSA drivers should hopefully solve the issue of contention for audio resources.

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