Yanking out ALSA - and going back to "working" sou

[Cuddles]

Anyone who has been following the "saga" of ALSA, and me, and my posts, will KNOW - I finally got ALSA running on my system, but, at a serious cost. I now have "introduced" noise/static with any sound recording I do - of which - this was not the issue with my "default" previous sound within a hdd installed Knoppix.

ALSA Subscriber E-Mail Group has been useless in getting any resolve for the noise - and all I know is that I can't record without getting this static/noise in my audio recordings now - which IS NOT a valid option.

Upon posting a querry on how to yank out ALSA - the suggestion to rip "alsa" from firing off in init.d - has turned into a system that has a 1.7GHz processor, that now runs sluggish, and extremely slow, mouse movement has become jumpy, instead of smooth moving, and if I wanted to put ALSA back into the init.d, it refuses to be added because it doesn't have a proper sort order ID.

Someone tell me, without having to re-install Knoppix, how I can take ALSA COMPLETELY OFF my system, and return to using arTs, since IT ACTUALLY WORKED without the noise/static problem. When my business deals with recording sound for my customers, a sound system like ALSA is NOT going to work if all it does is throw noise and static into a clean recording. Arts at least could do that, whereas, ALSA appears it can not...

I need to get my business back running, right now, I'm stuck with crummy ALSA, and noise, static recordings - of which - I never had this problem with the original sound that Knoppix had running before.

Thank you for any assistance, I thank you, my business thanks you, and my customers thank you,
Cuddles

[Durand Hicks]

Have you tried muting the microphone in ALSA?

[Markus]

Read your description about a clicking noise every 5 secs.

This is probably a shot in the dark but cd-drives have sound cable connectors, so do you by any chance have a automounting program looking for a disk in the drive every 5 secs?
Do a "dmesg" and "cat /var/log/syslog" to see if something is attempting to mount a cd.

[Cuddles]

Durand Hicks, I had that covered already - On the last test, I just did, I muted "everything" except what I was recording, and then "unmuted" the PCM to play the recording back - no luck - still static recorded...

Markus, good idea, nothing shows up in dmesg or in syslog - technically, the only thing is fstab that sets up the cd-rom devices - and they are set to noauto, and when I play a audio cd, or dvd, the device is never "mounted" but simply xine or xmms is "pointed" to the device for access - but it was a good idea.

PS - figured out my "sluggish system" problem - since taking out alsa from the boot area - removed it from init.d for start and stops levels 1 through 5 - arTs enabled to be sound - the server for arTs was causing the sluggishness. Working with the ALSA Group, I got alsa back into the init.d area again, and they appear to be more interested in helping now.

Cuddles

[Cuddles]

Not only did I get my ALSA off my system, but I resolved my recording issues, and all sounds appear to be working: XMMS plays w/o the five second click sound, Xine plays flawlessly, ReZound plays, and records, my input from my "Line In" w/o any introduction of noise...

A N D B E S T O F A L L -=- I T I S U S I N G A L S A

How did this all work out

I booted to the Knoppix Live CD to test the cheat-code ALSA, and it worked fine -=- So, I swallowed as much pride as I could, saved, or remembered as much of my configurations as possible -=- and "gutted" the system -=- re-formmated the system, and re-installed Knoppix to the hard drive with the cheat-code ALSA. It took some work getting everything I had back the way I had it, but it works now....

One problem I am having still, though...

I set "KDE Control Center -> Sound Notification" to use an external player, as mentioned by someone, to "aplay" - but I don't get any notifications - I don't think I have it -=- I tried to use it in a shell command window with a .WAV file, and the system says "aplay" doesn't exist -=- I also tried "aplayer" - and the same results, no can find...

Anyone have ALSA working, with a hard drive install of Knoppix v3.3 - hopefully the same as I do, using the ALSA cheat-code from the Live CD, and then installing to the hard drive -=- do you have KDE system notification sounds running, and how??????

Thanks for everyone who assisted me in (finally) getting sound working again on my system, I thank you, my system thanks you, and my (starving) business thanks you...

Now, I can at least get on with my business work, I have a long list of projects that can NOW be done, and maybe even get caught up with, now...

Thank you,
Cuddles

[champagnemojo]

That's great that you got it working Cuddles...sometimes it's best just to re-install. It's odd about aplay though, because according to the ALSA documentation it's a native utility. It's always worked great for me, both in the shell and in KDE Notifications.