Audio issues on Ubuntu Linux

[dougo]

You may have been wondering why I would ever need to quit and restart Firefox, anyway. It's because I've been having really annoying audio issues on Ubuntu Linux: different applications fight for control of the audio device, and rarely can two apps play audio at the same time. Some apps (VLC, Java) handle this gracefully, by just not playing audio when they can't get to the device. Others (Amarok, Totem) will hang or crash. The worst offender is the non-free Flash plugin for Firefox: once it grabs the audio device (e.g. when playing a YouTube video) it never lets it go, even after the Flash app ends and the page is closed—the only way to wrest control away is to quit Firefox. Also, if it can't get control, it hangs, and even after I quit Firefox I have to kill the process (and Firefox won't even let me restart until I've killed the process).

Any Ubuntu users out there? Have you run into this problem at all? I don't think I've done anything to change the default audio setup, and I install updates for everything pretty regularly. I would like to use Gnash or some other free Flash player instead of the non-free one, but so far none of them seem up to snuff for even basic things like YouTube. And even if I did switch, other apps still don't play nice with each other, which makes me think it's something about my Ubuntu setup itself that's causing the problems. Any help would be appreciated.

Update: Partial fix found.

Comments

[mshonle.livejournal.com]

As a skeptic of open source/free software "religulous" line of thinking, I just want to point out that you overlook the obvious flaws in Linux and claim it's all Flash's fault. :-)

It sure is hard business getting audio drivers to work for so many machines, and Linux surely is a gigantic effort made by some of the most talented developers out there... But it should be obvious that the world is better off having Windows and Mac OS X too.

[prusik.livejournal.com]

I assume you're using PulseAudio as a soundserver?
If so, have you tried the Firefox/Flash workaround (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PulseAudio) to get it to play nicely with PulseAudio.

(I use esd at work. When I was running Firefox 2.x, starting up firefox via esddsp did the trick. However, Firefox 3.x hangs if I try to start it up via esddsp. Argh...)

In any case, two problems here:

1. the non-free Flash plugin is not a team player. It grabs /dev/dsp directly rather than, oh I don't know, go through some sort of API which arbitrates access to shared resources.

2. There are several different APIs which deal with Linux audio and the situation has never been as clear as I'd like.

However, "overlooking the obvious flaws in Linux and claiming it's all Flash's fault" isn't unreasonable here. If Flash adhered to any of the APIs, your situation would be easier to deal with.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Argh, I never saw this comment! I got email notification for the other two comments on this post, but not yours. But, I happened to just run across libflashsupport myself, and it does seem to partially fix my problems. Thanks!

it's not just ubuntu

[choonpiaw.livejournal.com]

I have the same problem with Chrome on Windows. Flash is extremely unstable and is the most flakey piece of software out there on the web. I almost wish that Silverlight will take over instead!