[PD] pd in ubuntu 8.04: pd hijacks alsa?

[Aaron L.]

On Wed, Dec 8, 2010 at 4:29 PM, Lewis Pike <phaselocker at gmail.com> wrote:

> IOhannes m zmoelnig <zmoelnig at iem.at> writes:
>
> > On 2010-12-05 22:34, Aaron L. wrote:
> >> This is somewhat of a complete newb issue so I apologize up front for
> >> that.......
> >>
> >> However, it seems that I cannot use pdextended and watch a youtube video
> at
> >> the same time (the youtube vid is a pd tutorial).
> >>
> >> Here's what it's starting with:
> >>
> >>  pasuspender -- /usr/bin/pdextended -alsa %F
> >>
> >> Is it absolutely necessary to start pd with 'pasuspender'?
> >>
> >> When I don't (i.e. start it like this:  '/usr/bin/pdextended -alsa' ), I
> get
> >> a bunch of 'device or resource busy' messages in the terminal and I
> don't
> >> get any audio when doing the whold testtone thing).
> >>
> >> Is there any way around this?
> >
> >
> > well, this is exactly the way how alsa is supposed to work:
> > - only one application can access a (hardware) device at any point
> >
> > pulseaudio is a way to circumvent this limitation.
> > running Pd in pasuspender, effectively disables pulseaudio including all
> > it's features.
> >
> >
> > luckily there are ways around that.
> >
> > - use pulseaudio (not a good option, as Pd currently doesn't support it
> > :-(; btw, pa is geared towards the ordinary consumer multimedia desktop
> > where people would like to watch their youtube videos and at the same
> > time listen to the latest p!nk smash hit; Pd is not really targeted
> > towards that marketm, hence pa is not done yet)
> >
> > - use alsa's "dmix" interface; "dmix" is a virtual device that allows
> > several applications to send their audio output to the same hardware
> > device (without the applications even knowing of it). i'm not 100% sure
> > whether you can actually access this from within Pd....
> >
> > - use "jack". now you can think of jack as "pulseaudio for pros", it
> > allows to route the output of one process to the input of another
> > process (or more); "process" can be both hardware (your soundcard) or
> > software (Pd, your browser,...).
> > there are also ways to make alsa-only applications (e.g. your browser)
> > use a pseudo alsa device that really sends all audio to jack (thus the
> > application need not be aware of jack at all)
> >
> >
> > madt
> > IOhannes
>
> I'm new to Pd as well and ran into the ver same problem.  After a bit of
> guesswork, I tried running Pd with the command:
>
> pd -alsa -alsaadd dmix
>
> which seems to add an unlabelled audio output in the Pd alsa
> configuration menu.  When this output is selected, it solves the
> problem.  I works well enough, but I haven't tried using jack.  Can
> anyone who has used both dmix and jack offer offer an opinion on the
> pros and cons of each?
>
> .Lewis
>
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Interestingly enough, I ran into another bug when using Jack and PD.
Basically ends up with Jack going non-responsive and any attempt to rid the
system of any Jack processes don't really work.  All Jack processes simply
return a 'defunct' when you look at "top".  Makes Jack unusable since it
will neither start nor stop.  The more research I did revealed that this is
a bug in the 8.04 Hardy Heron kernel.

Big bummer.
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