[Techtalk] secret processes?

[Daniel Pittman]

Carla Schroder <carla at bratgrrl.com> writes:
> On Tuesday 11 August 2009 04:23:29 pm Karen Liesenfeld wrote:
>> Carla Schroder wrote:
>> >
>> > I have a 30-second music clip that I use for notifications on Pidgin.
>> > When I am testing my sound notifications, the whole file has to play and
>> > there is no way to stop playback. I can't even find a process to kill,
>> > which is scarier than not being able to shut off music playback. Any
>> > ideas how to hunt this down and see what's going on?

[...]

> I'm not using Ubuntu, this is a Debian machine running KDE 3.5. I have
> volume controls, that's not the problem.The problem is I can't stop the
> playback of the music file, and it disturbs me to not see a process for
> it. It is un-Linux to not be able to track this sort of thing down!

The simplest way to play audio on Unix was:

    file = fopen('/dev/dsp', 'w');
    fwrite(file, audio_data_buffer);
    fclose(file);

In that case the process playing the sound *was* the same process as was doing
everything else.  Are you sure that pidgin itself isn't playing the sound, via
alsa or OSS, internally?

Regards,
        Daniel
-- 
✣ Daniel Pittman            ✉ daniel at rimspace.net            ☎ +61 401 155 707
               ♽ made with 100 percent post-consumer electrons
   Looking for work?  Love Perl?  In Melbourne, Australia?  We are hiring.