I have installed KDE 4.1 on my system running Arch Linux. And I was contemplating installing PulseAudio sound server due to the limitations of Alsa alone.. Where does PulseAudio stand with Phonon and does it play Audio flawlessly? Because I read in the OpenSuse Wiki, that PulseAudio is not meant for Non-Gnome systems. link

Kindly recommend me a good sound solution for KDE.

Thanks in advance

Pulseaudio can be used under KDE, in 4.2 I believe some support went towards Pulseaudio, however the support is mostly done automatically through whichever Phonon backend is Active. I believe there is a KDE Daemon module which manages Phonon ( where to send Audio, etc. ) and it will ask the backend to use it if it is available ( this is automatically activated )

However, I myself had a bad experience with Pulseaudio on my machine ( destroyed the start of songs played through Amarok 1.x ) and higher CPU usage so explicitly removed support for it from my system.
I would not recommend using it however, as there is no KDE interface for managing Pulseaudio, you need to use the GNOME one.

bcooksley wrote:I would not recommend using it however, as there is no KDE interface for managing Pulseaudio, you need to use the GNOME one.

What else can you suggest? I am having a tough time playing sounds simultaneously esp. with the flash videos with Alsa..

This would be because Flash calls Alsa directly. you should be able to try Pulseaudio, although you might want to read up on "The Perfect Setup" from the pulseaudio site. Apparently Pulseaudio doesn't like sharing the audio device with anyone, so you need everyone to use it.

Be prepared however to install many GNOME + Gtk libraries if you do not have them if you want to be able to use it's configuration tools however.

bcooksley wrote:This would be because Flash calls Alsa directly.
Be prepared however to install many GNOME + Gtk libraries if you do not have them if you want to be able to use it's configuration tools however.

hmm.. is there anyway to play audio simultaneously with Alsa alone? how about OSS4, some have recommended this in the Arch forums

I do not think this is currently possible, unless you can make /dev/dsp a virtual device, or redirect Flash when it tries to use it to another device.

bcooksley wrote:I do not think this is currently possible, unless you can make /dev/dsp a virtual device, or redirect Flash when it tries to use it to another device.

thanks anyway for your help.. i will figure it out

No problem. If you find a solution please post it here, others may find it helpful

bcooksley wrote:No problem. If you find a solution please post it here, others may find it helpful

sure

how about OSS4, some have recommended this in the Arch forums

OSS4 have it's own mixer - vmix and it's quite capable.

In KDE 4.1 the only way to work with OSS4 is to use phonon-backend gstreamer. But it seems that in KDE 4.2 xine backend is working too:

It seems the KDE devs added support for OSS(4) in KDE4.2. At least it works fine here

screenshot:
http://omploader.org/vMTN3bQ/oss.png

BTW, creator of pulseaudio have some bias to oss4

cool.. thanks for the input

Really weird, I removed PulseAudio to install OSS4. And in between I just tested ALSA and I could play sounds simultaneously. Lucky I guess. Now I'm set to enjoy the ride with KDE 4. Thanks guys for your help.

* sayakb changed the [solved] tag location.

Although this is already marked as solved, I wanted to say that it is possible to use pulseaudio with KDE 4.
The only thing you need to do is, to make the ESD device in the Phonon settings the default one and use the xine-backend.

The only problem I found is that pulse uses a lot of CPU, but that has to do something with pulseaudios resampling.

sorry for posting in a topic marked as busy, but when I google for "pulseaudio and kde 4" this thread is under the top 20 results, so this might help some people.

pano

After reading this: http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2009/01/i-wi ... laide.html

...I decided to hold off on Pulseaudio for a while longer. I am very much inclined to believe Aaron. I dabbled with Pulseaudio several months ago, and it brought me nothing that I did not have, except for a splitting headache and CPU spikes...