Re: Playing sounds

[Derek Fountain <fountai hursley ibm com>]

> +-----
> | My Dell notebook has a Maestro sound card which runs under
> | the OSS sound system. 'play <file>' works fine, but
> | multimedia sound under GNOME-1.2 doesn't. Each sound tries
> | to play, but it comes out sounding like a half second hissy
> | noise. Presumably GNOME doesn't use 'play' for sounds.
> +--->8
> 
> This was discussed on linux-kernel recently, because someone tried to
> report it as a kernel bug.
> 
> It appears that esd does blind writes to /dev/dsp, without checking the
> result.  Since short writes occur when the audio driver can't accept more
> data, and esd isn't checking the return code from write(), most of the
> audio data is effectively discarded.
> 
> I see this on my SB16 at home as well.

Do I take it that there's nothing I can do about it? I've
turned sound off for the moment. It'd be a shame to be
completely soundless!