I have realplayer installed in a Redhat 9.0 machine. there is a error message when I open files with realplayer. error: cannot open the audio device.Another application may be using it. can realplayer work with other applications which use audio device at the same time?? If yes, how to do that?? Thank you!!

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Well to start off RedHat 9.0 is now ancient ..Move to either Fedora Core 4 (spinnoff of Red Hat 4.0 ) or Ubuntu or Latst SuSe personal edition

Secondly give the out out of these commands

1) lspci -v | grep audio
2) lspci
3) lsmod

Also ReapPlayer 10.x is available for Linux. It has better UI and other options. Your sound system is either alasa or oss ..it has support for both. I am not sure what RP 9.x supports

either try the new distros , or new player ..or if u want to stick with old one then post the out put of the commands i asked. (just commands and not the number or brackets)

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i meant Spinnoff of Red Hat in general ..not 4.0

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I've had this problem too. Realplayer doesn't have support for alsa sound or something like that, i'm not sure. You will have to run it under simulated OSS sound.

Type 'aoss realplay' in the command shell. It works for me.

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Righty.

Unless you have a really cool sound card, it will not support hardware mixing.
Your sound card can only play one sound at a time, and therefore the sound cards device node can only be opened by one application at a time.

The solution is.... Software mixing.
In the oldern days, the KDE software mixer wasnt up to much, so most applications were designed to grab exclusine access oto the sound card.

thankfully, the KDE audio mixer (arts) is alot better now, almost no lagg etc etc.

You realplayer cannot open the sound device becasee ARTS (the software mixer) has exclusive access to it.

There are 4 possable solutions (i would recomend 3 or 4)
1) dissable arts, let whatever program you are using at the time have complete direct access ot the sound card.

2) set arts to release the sound card after a period of inactivity, (maybe 5 seconds)
so that KDE and your media applications can share the sound card. (i dont recomend this)

3) Find a pluggin, or configure your media software to use the arts sound server. (i recomend this)

4) if there is no "Use ARTS sound output" option for your media player, use the arts sound wrapper.

for example, if the name of your porgram is realplayer, run the command "artsdsp realplayer"
The arts sound server will now *look* like a real sound card to your media applications, and sound will mix nicely.

In Linux, programs are usually designed by default NOT to use arts, because not everyone has KDE installed and running.

using option 3 or 4 will allow all your noisy applications to play sound at the same time, (like MSwindows does)

enjoy.

 

 

 

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When they designed RealPlayer, they should've noticed that OSS is obsolete and ALSA is the new soundsystem.

How blind are they?

xboxrulz

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I got the same message today using Mepis. I fixed it just by configuring the sound card drivers. Find out how one does it in Red Hat, and then do it. It's almost certainly your entire problem.

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Redhat 9.0 doesn't come w/ ALSA, so you need to install the backwards compat version of ALSA then start it, then use aoss to pipe the sound.

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no, but it does come with TOSS which will work fine with ARTS.

Jedipi is having trouble getting software mixing to work, so lets not complicate things by telling him he needs to patch and recompile his kernel, he is obviously new to linux, and this is probably beyond his abilities.

So lets stick with the simple answer, use ARTS.

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ALSA can do software mixing, just install the backwards compatibility layer

xboxrulz

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