On Fri, 2009-01-02 at 13:49 -0700, Phil Meyer wrote:
There are several apps, and used to be several more, that still do
not
play nice with pulseaudio.
For me, pidgin was the biggest culprit until a recent update.
Long ago, I switched its /playing sounds/ preference to run a particular
command, and I used the "paplay" one. The paplay command is a
pulseaudio sound player, so it ought to work fine.
What happened for me, was that apps that professed support for
pulseaudio, such as amarok, would spin and cause the pulseaudio daemon
to die at some random beep from pidgin. Once the deamon died, CPU
usage returned to normal, but no more sound.
Which wasn't their fault. Pidgin had jammed up the audio system ahead
of them. It wouldn't matter how nicely they used pulseaudio, if
something else has wedged the audio sub-system. It wasn't those
applications failing, it was pulseaudio being unable to work.
Restarting pulseaudio always fixed it, but the occurrence was
random;
5 minutes; two days?
Yes, I'd noticed that pidgin's interference was somewhat unpredictable.
It may well be that it wasn't generating sound events, or that luck
would have it that nothing else was using the sound system at the same
time.
Since the update to pidgin-2.5.2-6.fc10.x86_64, those have stopped.
I have the same version, but for Fedora 9. I haven't tried going back
to letting it play sounds. But I suspect it'd still foul up, as the
sound options still don't have an entry for using pulseaudio. Unless,
of course, something else is pretending to be alsa or esd to pidgin, so
it really uses pulseaudio.
However, about the same time, we got an upgrade to amarok that I
could
not tolerate. I have since switched to rhythmbox, but it pauses at
virtually all focus changes into or out of firefox and thunderbird. I
suspect that compiz is still struggling with those two apps, as they
are difficult to move around the screen for me.
I've found various sound players do that, and I wasn't using compiz. It
seemed that they were too CPU intensive to do two things at once without
interfering with each other. Only the simpler ones didn't hiccup.
--
[tim@localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.9-73.fc9.i686
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