Re: [TCLUG:4378] Sound problems

[Sandipan Panigrahi <pani@frontiernet.net>]

I do not know if this made it to the TCLUG so I am reposting.

You are most probably running out of memory in your lower 16M
of RAM. From what I remember of DMA on the PC,
you can only allocate memory for DMA buffers in the lower 16M.

Look to see if there are other programs that are running which
eat away memory, run top/ps aux and see the memory usage of all apps. 
Try exiting a few applications that take up space and then rerun
the mpl123.  

If this is indeed the problem, I think the 2.2 kernel allows
you to reserve memory blocks somehow, I am happy on my 2.0.X
so I cannot verify. You can then reserve blocks for DMA
buffer.

You could also remove all memory chips and just keep 16M on 
your machine then all memory is forced to be allocated from 
the 16M, but not a good idea I guess :).

I could be grossly mistaken too as I usually am and if so my 
apologies, but then we would have eliminated one more incorrect 
answer thus bringing us closer to the correct one !

regards,
sandipan

--
Ben Luey wrote:
> 
> If the problem goes away on reboot, then the problem is probably a
> conflicting program loading. mp3's stop working for me whenever esd
> (enlightenment sound daemon) is loaded. run `ps aux` and see if there are
> any suspicious programs running. Good Luck,
> 
> Ben
> 
> On Mon, 1 Mar 1999, Luke Francl wrote:
> 
> > Hi everybody...I'm having a problem with sound under Linux (Slackware 3.6,
> > kernel 2.2.2). Last weekend, I had a friend help me get sound working (for
> > the first time, woohoo!). I've got an Awe 64 PnP and support for it is
> > compiled as a module. I use isapnp to configure the card...And it works
> > fine for CDs all the time, but after some time of playing mp3s (in this
> > case, it was about a day and a half) it will just suddenly stop working,
> > giving me this error:
> >
> > Sound error: Couldn't allocate DMA buffer
> > Can't open /dev/dsp!
> >
> > I'm using mpg123 to play my mp3s...Rebooting solved the problem last time,
> > but now It's happened again...I don't really want to reboot every day and
> > a half just so I can play music. (Shades of Windows!)
> >
> > Does anyone know what could causing this problem, or how to fix it?
> >
> > Thanks,
> >       Luke
> >
> >
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> 
> Ben Luey
> lueyb@carleton.edu
> ICQ: 19144397
> 
> If encryption is outlawed, only criminals wil$%YHG#%^&
> 
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