[Regicide]

I have ALSA working perfectly on my AMD64 system now. But, for some reason I think that applications that use Arts are not having any sound. For example, when I go into Control Center and do a Test Sound, nothing happens. Then, to make sure that artsd is running, I go into the shell and type artsd. Which proceeds to give this output:

There are already artsd objects registered, looking if they are active...

Error: Can't add object reference (probably artsd is already running).

This might not be related, but I do not have any Midi playback in KDE. But, when I run Juk to play my MP3s, it runs and sounds fine.

I am running Gentoo with the 2.6.12 kernel. I used the drivers from ALSA to work with my nForce 3 on board sound. If anyone has any ideas, it would be greatly appreciated.

[tsunam]

I'd probably, in a terminal do a killall artsd then start it in the console, and leave the console up. Go about your business and see if you find/get any "can not open pcm device etc etc etc"

*note* I've used kde for like 2 days (in 3 years of using linux) at most and abstain from arts and gnome's versions of sound mixers.

[Regicide]

Thanks for the quick reply Tsunam!

I did what you said and these are the errors messages that I get:

akode: Could not open frame-decoder
couldn't load file /usr/kde/3.4/share/sounds/KDE_Window_Open.ogg
akode: Could not open frame-decoder
couldn't load file /usr/kde/3.4/share/sounds/KDE_Startup_1.ogg
akode: Could not open frame-decoder
couldn't load file /usr/kde/3.4/share/sounds/KDE_Window_Close.ogg

I then looked in /usr/kde/3.4/share/sounds and those files mentioned do exist. I then tried to play them with mplayer and they played fine.

So far, I am none to pleased with Artsd. So, is there anyway to have KDE use ALSA instead?

[brendandonhu]

Yes, its all in the Docs.
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/alsa-guide.xml

[tsunam]

regicide, looks like a permission problem possibly, which is quite odd for those files. As brendandonhu said, you can do kde with alsa and not with arts(arts is just a complex software mixer for sounds in kde). The guide should take you through the steps.

I believe also that with kde since 3.3+ that gentoo allows you to build with -arts. Don't have the laptop up and booted to see though.

[Regicide]

After hours of work, I finally got it figured out. Basiclly all the system sounds are in ogg format. And for some reason KDE did not come with ogg support built in. So I emerged vorbis-ogg. Then, I went into Control Center -> Sound & Multimedia -> System Notification -> Player Settings. Once there, I had it use ogg123 as an external player of system sounds. And now I have my system sounds working. Thanks to both Tsunam and Brendandonhu for their help!

[GlowingApple]

I had the same issue when I upgraded to KDE 3.5.7 (currently marked as unstable). I found that emerging akode with the vorbis use flag solved the problem, and I can use arts as the sound manager for KDE. Perusing through the Gentoo forums a lot of users recommend adding arts, vorbis, and alsa to the global use flags (provided that you're using arts and alsa that is).