nwmovies/nwmovies.README.soundcard.txt at master · nwnlinux/nwmovies · GitHub

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
This information is old, but left here for historical (hysterical?)
purposes..

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

These are some notes regarding NWN, and the various options for sound.

Linux has multiple different ways to output sound, all with various
benefits, and detractions.   They can be broken down multiple ways:

OSS
ALSA

ESD
ARTSC
PulseAudio

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

OSS:  The original sound API.  Fairly old, and not much in use.
ALSA: The "Advanced Linux Sound Architecture", the more modern sound API.

With either sound API, presuming a correct install, one of the main source
of the "no sound" issue is rooted in the either sound API to support playing
multiple sounds, by multiple programs, at the same time.

OSS does not support multiple programs playing sounds, so basically, the
first program to grab the sound device, gets it, and keeps it till its
done.

ALSA will support multiple programs playing sound, if your sound card
supports it, or you if you configure "software mixing" via something called
DMIX.

Note, this software mixing issue also effects NWMovies, as both NWN, and
BinkPlayer often fight over the soundcard.  (BinkPlayer tends to lose. :) )

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

As a general rule, onboard sound devices tend to only support playing one
sound at a time, where as dedicated sound cards tend support more than one.

If you examine the output of "cat /proc/asound/pcm" from a terminal window
you can determine the number of simultaneous sounds ALSA can play at one
time.

uholld1@crusader:~$ cat /proc/asound/pcm
00-02: ALC883 Analog : ALC883 Analog : capture 2
00-01: ALC883 Digital : ALC883 Digital : playback 1 : capture 1
00-00: ALC883 Analog : ALC883 Analog : playback 1 : capture 2

Note the last line.  There's only 1 Analog "playback" device.  IE: My
soundcard can only play one sound at a time.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

To deal with the issue of only one playing one sound at a time, the concept
of "software mixing" has evolved.   This has so far taken the form of a
system daemon running in the background, or in ALSA's case something called
DMIX that must be configured first.

The common daemons:

ESD:  Is generally used with the Gnome Desktop.
ARTSC: Is generally used with the KDE Desktop.
PulseAudio:  Is a very new sound system daemon, used in very new
distributions, such as FedoraCore 9, and Ubuntu 8.04, and quite frankly,
I've no experience with it.

DMIX is part of the ALSA API, and once configured, should be transparent.

The libSDL provided with NWN, in the NWN/lib directory is
fairly old, and does not support ALSA, nor PulseAudio.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

libSDL is supposed to be smart enough to choose the "best" audio driver
that it supports, and is availble on your system.

As said above, the libSDL supplied with NWN is old, and does not support
ALSA, nor PulseAudio.  The recommendation therefore is to modify the
LD_LIBRARY_PATH entry in the nwn startup script, and remove the reference
to "./lib".   NWN will then use the system libSDL, which is most likely
much new, and supports more sound options.

If you wish to override the audio driver selected, you may use the
SDL_AUDIODRIVER environment variable to specify a specific audio driver.

See: http://www.libsdl.org/cgi/docwiki.cgi/SDL_envvars for further details.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

The output of "nwmovies_install.pl" will hopefully give you some clues as
to how your audio system is configured.

In my opinion the safest and best bet for sound output is to go straight to
ALSA, and use DMIX for software mixing, if necessary.

* If you need to configure DMIX, See below for a sample .asoundrc to save in
your home directory. (My thanks to Skildron for supplying it)

* Force libSDL to use ALSA by adding the following line to your NWN startup
  script 'nwn'

  export SDL_AUDIODRIVER=alsa

* If you are currently using one of the sound system daemons, you will need
  to shut it down before starting NWN. kk

For ESD:         esdctl standby; ./nwn
For ARTS:        artsshell suspend; ./nwn

For PulseAudio:  pasuspender ./nwn

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

If you wish to investigate attempting to get NWN to work with your
currently running sound daemons the following may be of some use.

* The manpage for "esddsp"
* The manpage for "artsdsp"

The following webpage for PulseAudio:

http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/PerfectSetup

And of course, the http://www.libsdl.org/cgi/docwiki.cgi/SDL_envvars for
libSDL configuration.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sample .asoundrc
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

pcm.!default {
	type plug
	slave.pcm "dmixer"
}

pcm.dsp0 {
	type plug
	slave.pcm "dmixer"
}

pcm.dmixer {
	type dmix
	ipc_key 1024
	slave {
		pcm "hw:0,0"
		period_time 0
		period_size 1024
		buffer_size 8192
		rate 48000
	}
	bindings {
		0 0
		1 1
	}
}

ctl.dmixer {
	type hw
	card 0
}