Loud ringing after ALSA sound configured

**Wrincle** · December 8th, 2004, 01:49 AM

I just installed Slackware 10, successfully. When I went to configure my ALSA-enabled sound, it seemed to go just fine, but when I boot into KDE I get an extremely loud ringing noise whenever a sound is played.

What's going on?

I tried installing emu10k1 as a different driver, but that didn't help either.

Thanks for your time.

**krohnjw** · December 8th, 2004, 01:55 AM

What kind of ringing, like phone ringing?

What sound card are we working with here?
Have you tried disabling arts and seeing if there is a difference?
Have you tried OSS?
What version of ALSA is running?
Are all the volumes set properly in alsamixer?

**novadragoon** · December 8th, 2004, 03:15 PM

I kinda remeber this when i installed Mandrake with KDE on my roommates computer

look for a process called artsd or somesuch and kill it, and see if that makes it go away, then look through KDE config so that it doesnt turn on again

**krohnjw** · December 8th, 2004, 03:39 PM

Well arts is going to manage access to the sound card, so killing arts will fix the problem, but it will also make it so that no 2 sounsd can play at one time.

So playing music will equal no sound from any other applications, etc. If arts is the problem you are better off fixing it than merely killing the process.

**James T** · December 8th, 2004, 07:14 PM

Exactly my own experience with slack 10 and kde and alsa.

Turn the volume down, go through console into alsamixer and pull all your volumes down. You have created a feedback loop in the sound card (actually the default kde sound volumes do this). Once you have it right you need to save the new sound values through kdes sound config so that when kde loads it loads a sensible value. Personally I turned the kde sound loader off and let alsactl restore in the /etc/rc.d/rc.* scripts set the sound. You will also notice that when you use xmms with alsa settings that on each new song it resets the mixer settings to it's preference. I haven't worked out how to stop this.

Edit: 'alsactl store' after you are happy with alsamixer settings. rc scripts will then have the right profile to load.

**SpookyEddy** · December 9th, 2004, 06:37 AM

Well arts is going to manage access to the sound card, so killing arts will fix the problem, but it will also make it so that no 2 sounsd can play at one time.

This is only the case if the card and driver do not support hardware mixing. The SB Live I have installed can play multiple tracks at once without artsd or esd.

Regards

ed