Etoys sound recording freezes

[bert]

When recording sound in Etoys (and even afterwards), it freezes every once in a while. This might be related to compression settings.

Click the supplies icon (open box in tool bar), drag out the object catalog, click multimedia, drag out a SoundRecorder. Compression settings are in the menu (round white button in the recorder)

Seen in os43.

[Quozl]

triage.

[triagebot]

changed by irc user Quozl:

[bert]

Hopefully fixed in etoys-4.1.2390 by preferring pulse over oss (needs a squeak-vm package which includes the vm-sound-pulse module)

[erikos]

Replying to bert:

Hopefully fixed in etoys-4.1.2390 by preferring pulse over oss (needs a squeak-vm package which includes the vm-sound-pulse module)

I can reproduce the freeze only on the XO-1.5. I can not stop the recording anymore, neither. The Xo-1 seem to not freeze and the recording works ok (despite the low quality #9723). (Latest 10.1.3 build that is). Is Etoys using oss? I thought maybe #10393 would be related...

[erikos]

Sorry, about the bad quality I meant #9527.

[bert]

Etoys only overrides the Squeak VM's audio auto detection if Pulse is running. Before 4.1.2390 it used OSS if Pulse is detected because quality was worse in Pulse, now it uses Pulse directly, to avoid freezing: http://dev.laptop.org/git/projects/etoys/diff/etoys.in?id=cc6ff35a6ffb39b07cef6726214a0c1b9b16566b

Unless told specifically which audio module to use, the Squeak VM chooses between ALSA and OSS on its own. IIRC it prefers ALSA over OSS. Pulse's ALSA emulation is incomplete, that's the reason why dmoco even wrote the pulse module.

You can force another audio driver by passing the -vm-sound option to Squeak.