Is it possible for two users logged into two accounts in KDE (i.e. visible on Ctrl-Alt-F7 and Ctrl-Alt-F8) to both play music in Amarok at the same time?

I understand that this would make a racket (!), but at the moment the behaviour on my box is very odd:

If user 1 presses [play] in Amarok, then music starts playing.
If user 2 then presses [play] in Amarok, the button is depressed, but no audio is heard.
If user 1 then presses [stop] in Amarok, user 2\'s music is heard! It is as though User 2 has to wait their turn to access the soundcard.

Both users are using th artsdsink gstreamer output. If I understand correctly, this is the arts daemon, a software mixer which allows multiple sounds to be mixed together in software and then played to the soundcard simultaneously.

Why, then, are the outputs of the two simultaneous Amarok instances not mixed together and heard simultaneously?

Does everyone else get this same behaviour, or are two users able to play Amarok simultaneously on your setup? I\'d love to hear other people\'s experiences on this.

It is as follows:
First user starts up KDE, arts blocks the audio device
Second user starts up KDE, arts is not able to connect to the audio device and will not play any audio (that\'s why you see the play button faded out).

If arts is using alsa (and not the oss emulation), it might be possible to start to arts demons at the same time. (but who wants to listen to music from two users at the same time???)

Anyway, it sounds like the users are remotely logging in, thus you probably want to run amarok locally and not remotely on the server, this should solve all problems

Just remove artsd. Instead, use the alsasink for GStreamer. ALSA mixes audio automatically.

Hello!
I recently discovered amarok player. I am looking for a solution to play different music in various rooms but with one player. I installed 3 soundcards.
I tried to start amarok more than once but it is not possible. Also so to define various soundcards.

Can anyone give some hints?
Thanks in advance

schdefan

Run a user for each instance of amarok you want to have (i.e. for each room). Use the xine options to bind amarok to a specific soundcard (alsa can do the trick, you probably want to search for this, I cannot remember the details.).

marcel: Thanks for your hint. Runn a user for each instance. With the gstreamer engine and output plugin alsasink and device
hw:0,0 for the first soundcard
hw:1,0 for the second soundcard I can play different music.

schdefan

markey wrote:

Just remove artsd. Instead, use the alsasink for GStreamer. ALSA mixes audio automatically.

I\'m not sure what you mean by "remove artsd".
I tried setting Amarok\'s output to GStreamer\'s alsasink for both instances of Amarok (one on Ctrl-Alt-F7, one on Ctrl-Alt-F8) and if I try to play one whilst the other is playing Amarok gives me an error:

[GStreamer Error] ** gstalsa.c(1638): gst_alsa_open_audio: /thread/audiobin/alsasink2: system error

(FWIW, my KDE sound system is configured to output through ALSA. I\'m not sure if Amarok/GStreamer/alsasink will bypass this or not.)