[Techtalk] secret processes?

Wim De Smet kromagg at gmail.com
Wed Aug 12 06:42:36 UTC 2009


Hi,

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 3:17 AM, Daniel Pittman<daniel at rimspace.net> wrote:
> 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?

I think that's right, though it's probably using gstreamer API's.

regards,
Wim


More information about the Techtalk mailing list