Cooperation with non-esd applications should be improved

[Eamonn Sullivan]

The default configuration of esd in /etc/esound/esd.conf is auto_spawn=0, which
seems to cause mplayer, RealPlayer, skype and VLC to fail. Setting it to
auto_spawn=1 seems to clear up the problems. I'm not sure what the side effects
of this are.

[Eamonn Sullivan (eamonn-sullivan)]

*** Bug 13919 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Daniel Robitaille (robitaille)]

potential presence of side-effects being hinted in the man pages of esd:

auto_spawn
           0 or 1 indicating whether the esd library should automatically
           spawn a daemon if one is not running when a sound is played. This
           option is not recommended for Gnome users who have enabled sound
           for events in Gnome.

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

The supported software provided by Ubuntu is configured to use esound by
default, so this is only an issue when using unsupported software.

esd is configured to start when the sure logs in, and stop when they log out,
and there are good reasons for this. So far, we have not found a way to allow
these unsupported apps to coexist peacefully with the esound-based desktop audio
infrastructure, but we are open to suggestions for the future. Approaches which
involve stopping esd (auto_spawn, esd -as <secs>, etc.) are undesirable for
various reasons.

[Eamonn Sullivan (eamonn-sullivan)]

(In reply to comment #3)
> The supported software provided by Ubuntu is configured to use esound by
> default, so this is only an issue when using unsupported software.
>
> esd is configured to start when the sure logs in, and stop when they log out,
> and there are good reasons for this. So far, we have not found a way to allow
> these unsupported apps to coexist peacefully with the esound-based desktop audio
> infrastructure, but we are open to suggestions for the future. Approaches which
> involve stopping esd (auto_spawn, esd -as <secs>, etc.) are undesirable for
> various reasons.

More information on what those various reasons are might point the way toward a
temporary fix -- maybe a wrapper script for some popular applications like
RealPlayer or Skype. What happens? Does the user eventually run out of memory?

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

They've already been discussed elsewhere; you should be able to find some closed
bugs in Bugzilla and transfer the information here.

Wrapper scripts using esddsp are often a reasonable approach, but this is a
fragile hack, and would need to be implemented by the vendors of the proprietary
software

[Eamonn Sullivan (eamonn-sullivan)]

(In reply to comment #5)
> They've already been discussed elsewhere; you should be able to find some closed
> bugs in Bugzilla and transfer the information here.
>
> Wrapper scripts using esddsp are often a reasonable approach, but this is a
> fragile hack, and would need to be implemented by the vendors of the proprietary
> software

https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=5696

OK, that's that, then. Won't fix. This question will come up repeatedly on the
user forum, so I'll continue to run auto_spawn=1 as an experiment and see what
bad things happen, at least for me. I'm at work now and can't check
.xsession_errors, but it seems from the previous bug that I may find errors in
there.

I'm not trying to be difficult -- there are real occassions when users need to
run non-free. I'm a news wire editor in the U.K. and listening to BBC Radio 4 is
a must, at least when I get up (around 5am) and the computer is the most
convenient. I also have a mixed network at home with Windows, Ubuntu and Mac
OSX, plus some seriously clueless relatives all over the world. Skype, non-free
as it is, is currently the best and easiest solution.

On the plus side, these applications appeared to work correctly on polypaudio,
albiet with the other problems that have led to the decision to revert to esound.

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

*** Bug 14048 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

*** Bug 15141 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

*** Bug 15251 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

*** Bug 16389 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

See http://udu.wiki.ubuntu.com/AudioInfrastructure for the outcome of Ubuntu
Down Under discussions on this and related subjects

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Breezy now uses libesd-alsa0 by default and has ALSA 1.0.9, which means that
dmix is enabled and applications can open the sound card over the ALSA interface
while esound is running.

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

*** Bug 18002 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***