On 2010-12-05 22:34, Aaron L. wrote:
This is somewhat of a complete newb issue so I apologize up front for that.......
However, it seems that I cannot use pdextended and watch a youtube video at the same time (the youtube vid is a pd tutorial).
Here's what it's starting with:
pasuspender -- /usr/bin/pdextended -alsa %F
Is it absolutely necessary to start pd with 'pasuspender'?
When I don't (i.e. start it like this: '/usr/bin/pdextended -alsa' ), I get a bunch of 'device or resource busy' messages in the terminal and I don't get any audio when doing the whold testtone thing).
Is there any way around this?
well, this is exactly the way how alsa is supposed to work:
- only one application can access a (hardware) device at any point
pulseaudio is a way to circumvent this limitation. running Pd in pasuspender, effectively disables pulseaudio including all it's features.
luckily there are ways around that.
- use pulseaudio (not a good option, as Pd currently doesn't support it
:-(; btw, pa is geared towards the ordinary consumer multimedia desktop where people would like to watch their youtube videos and at the same time listen to the latest p!nk smash hit; Pd is not really targeted towards that marketm, hence pa is not done yet)
- use alsa's "dmix" interface; "dmix" is a virtual device that allows
several applications to send their audio output to the same hardware device (without the applications even knowing of it). i'm not 100% sure whether you can actually access this from within Pd....
- use "jack". now you can think of jack as "pulseaudio for pros", it
allows to route the output of one process to the input of another process (or more); "process" can be both hardware (your soundcard) or software (Pd, your browser,...). there are also ways to make alsa-only applications (e.g. your browser) use a pseudo alsa device that really sends all audio to jack (thus the application need not be aware of jack at all)
madt IOhannes