I have 2 soundcards in my computer. I want to redirect the output of amarok to the second one. therefore I must use gstreamer, because only here I can specify a certain device.

so I use gstreamer and it works. but there are 2 problems

1. the sound sometimes hang for a few seconds if CPU load is very high. I assume it's because of low priority of gstreamer - at least amarok reports that at stdout when starting from konsole. how can I increase the priority?? Can I set a suid-bit to a gstream-binary? which one - there is no gstreamer daemon in my process list.

2. When sound is playing in amarok, there is no sound output from my first soundcard - which should receive the sound from the running artsd.

1917 wrote:

I have 2 soundcards in my computer. I want to redirect the output of amarok to the second one. therefore I must use gstreamer, because only here I can specify a certain device.

so I use gstreamer and it works. but there are 2 problems

1. the sound sometimes hang for a few seconds if CPU load is very high. I assume it's because of low priority of gstreamer - at least amarok reports that at stdout when starting from konsole. how can I increase the priority?? Can I set a suid-bit to a gstream-binary? which one - there is no gstreamer daemon in my process list.

There are two options to improve the situation:

1) Renice amarok after startup to a value below 0. This could be done with a simple script, if you'd like to have some automation.

2) Increase the sound buffer in your alsa configuration file (asound.conf). A user told me that this also helps to reduce dropouts.
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2. When sound is playing in amarok, there is no sound output from my first soundcard - which should receive the sound from the running artsd.

Perhaps your first soundcard does not support hardware mixing, so you need to use the dmix plugin. There could be other reasons though; I cannot tell. In general artsd is a nasty beast and you probably just want to get rid of it.