IOhannes m zmoelnig zmoelnig@iem.at writes:
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
I'm new to Pd as well and ran into the ver same problem. After a bit of guesswork, I tried running Pd with the command:
pd -alsa -alsaadd dmix
which seems to add an unlabelled audio output in the Pd alsa configuration menu. When this output is selected, it solves the problem. I works well enough, but I haven't tried using jack. Can anyone who has used both dmix and jack offer offer an opinion on the pros and cons of each?
.Lewis