sound problems..

[alperyilmaz]

Hi,
I tried both Brainworkshop 4.4 and 4.7, in Linux (64bit) environment
and I'm having sound problems. First of all, the sound is missing 80%
of the time. At the remaining cases (~20%), there's sound for couple
of letters, and then sound is gone forever.

Here's my environment:
OS: Linux (2.6.31-17-generic, x86_64)
Python version 2.6.4
python-openal version 0.1.6
OpenAL : i both tried deb package and the source package. version of
source package was openal-soft-1.11.753
i installed avbin as directed (avbin-linux-x86-64-7)

I tried modifying the config file, by making music and applause false,
and it didn't help.

One more thing, when I exit the software after having sound problems,
I see the following message in terminal:
AL lib: ALc.c:1368: exit(): closing 1 Device
AL lib: ALc.c:1345: alcCloseDevice(): destroying 1 Context
AL lib: alSource.c:2362: alcDestroyContext(): deleting 3 Source(s)

usually, program is stuck after printing the third line and I have to
do Ctrl-C to kill it.
Number of sources (here, 3) varies..

Is this error recoverable?

[Jonathan Toomim]

Thanks for the bug report. BrainWorkshop has had sound problems for a
while, and we've not been able to track them down, partially because
they're intermittent and unreliable. I haven't been able to reproduce
them all of the time, which makes it difficult to fix it. For
example, I will be able to do maybe 30 sessions (of 2 audio playbacks
each) on average before it cuts out. It sounds like you have a much
more reproducible problem, which means we might be able to actually
figure out what's going on. So let's try.

I'm particularly curious about the "deleting 3 Source(s)" line. You
said the number varies. I would like to know why. I'm guessing the
number would be the number of sound files that BW tried to play but
did not play successfully, but it might be a few other things,
including the number of sounds that BW tried to play unsuccessfully
plus the file that played but did not close successfully. It would be
helpful if you could run BW a few times, and record the following data
for each run:

1. How many sounds did you hear play?

2. How many sounds played partially, but cut out partway through?
(Probably zero.)

3. How many sounds should have played that didn't play before you
closed BW?

4. How many Source(s) did AL lib have to delete?

Something else to try:

Search in brainworkshop.pyw (you're running BW from the python source,
right?) for a line that goes something like this:

pyglet.options['audio'] = ('directsound', 'openal', 'alsa', )

That line describes the order in which pyglet (the A/V library BW
uses) will try various audio backends. If OpenAL is buggy for you, we
can try something else. Try changing the order around, and maybe
adding 'pulse' before 'openal'. Maybe this order:

pyglet.options['audio'] = ('directsound', 'alsa', 'pulse',
'openal', )

Also, what linux distro are you using? Ubuntu?

Another bug report that is not identical, but similar:

http://groups.google.com/group/brain-training/browse_thread/thread/1a22d070195f2162

Let's see if we can get this to work.

Jonathan

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[alperyilmaz]

Hi Jonathan,

changing the line pyglet.options['audio'] = ('directsound', 'openal',
'alsa', ) helped the problem. since i'm not a python programmer, i
noticed that i changed the line into
pyglet.options['audio'] = ('directsound', 'alsa', 'pulse', 'openal')
instead of

pyglet.options['audio'] = ('directsound', 'alsa', 'pulse',
'openal', )

so the comma at the end didn't give errors.

now, i can use brainworkshop.. i'm happy.. thanks for your help..

> http://groups.google.com/group/brain-training/browse_thread/thread/1a...