Exclusive Audio Issues

[davidmn]

I am running LMDE and I am having some strange audio issues. It would appear that only one program at a time can be outputting audio. This is true for Banshee and Rhythmbox. When they are running no other program can output sound. This is rather annoying. What should I do?

UPDATE
It would appear that the same is also true for playing a youtube video and pidgin's sound not working.

[dawgdoc]

This post seems to address your issue re: mutually exclusive audio from media players and flash sources.
viewtopic.php?f=141&t=55381&#p318668

[davidmn]

My /etc/asound.conf already looks like that.

[Halzen]

A problem very similar actually happened to me just yesterday. I "fixed" it by aptitude purging all of the sound packages that came with LMDE and putting on a fresh Pulseaudio install (with compat packages too, of course). My USB headset started working too - bonus!

[davidmn]

Mine isn't just with flash, did you have that issue Halzen?

[Halzen]

Mine isn't just with flash, did you have that issue Halzen?

Well, I don't think anyone said it was just with Flash. I was having two issues that were solved with a full reinstall:
1. When my selected program was playing audio, I heard nothing from background apps or sources.
2. Plugging in a headset caused all sound devices to stop working until I rebooted.

If there is one area that Linux truly needs to play catch-up, it is definitely sound.

[davidmn]

By full reinstall you mean wiping the drive and installing the entire OS or just sound programs? I figure I may have to do a nuke and pave soon anyway.

[Halzen]

By full reinstall you mean wiping the drive and installing the entire OS or just sound programs? I figure I may have to do a nuke and pave soon anyway.

I'm sorry for the vagueness. By full reinstall, I meant removing everything sound that came with LMDE (PulseAudio, ALSA, and related packages) and doing a fresh PulseAudio install with compat packages.

[davidmn]

This may be a really dumb question, what are compat packages?

[Halzen]

This may be a really dumb question, what are compat packages?

There is only one dumb question in existence: "Can I ask you a question?"

As I understand it, compat packages are typically installed alongside a sound driver (PulseAudio, ALSA, OSS, etc.) to provide compatibility with functions that were designed for a different driver. Installing pulseaudio-esound-compat, for example, allows an installed PulseAudio system to completely replace Esound as a software sound driver. My philosophy is (until further notice) that I would rather have one working driver than a bunch of screwy ones.

[davidmn]

I see.

Something to shed more light on the error. I opened a youtube link and started up ryhthmbox, I pressed play on RB while YT was running and it gave me an error about audiosinkbin (I think) then I pressed play again and it said 'Unable to start playback pipeline'.