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Audio works in gnome, but not shell

Posted: Mon Nov 06, 2006 1:50 am
by ^rooker
[PROBLEM]
When trying to run any application that tries to directly output sound, I got this errormessage:
Linux: can't open /dev/dsp
although sound was working properly for all graphical applications (I'm running Ubuntu 6.06 / gnome)

echo "xxx" > /dev/dsp returned this error:
bash: /dev/dsp: Device or resource busy
although I had the correct access rights set (e.g.: my user was in group audio).

[SOLUTION]
While this command:
echo "hello world" | festival --tts --pipe
didn't work and resulted in the above errors, using "esddsp" did the job:
echo "hello world" | esddsp festival --tts --pipe
The problem was that the "esd" (EsounD - The Enlightened Sound Daemon) was blocking direct access to the soundcard, so programs must either go through alsa or esd (if I understood correctly).

- esddsp is doing exactly this rerouting. voila!