[PlanetCCRMA] Confusing Sound Issues in Fedora Core 3

[Bradley S. Campbell]

Hi everyone,

I feel like I'm the same boat as Pierre with all this sound stuff in 
FC3.  I do hear sounds in FC3 on startup (i.e. system sounds).  If I use 
the libALSA output plugin in XMMS, I can use XMMS to play sounds, but I 
can no longer hear system sounds -- I may be mistaken, but I thought the 
whole purpose of ALSA was to be able to stream sounds from many 
different concurrent applications through one output stream.  This sort 
of leads me to my next point -- I've spent the better part of weekend 
modifying everything from /etc/modprobe.conf  and ~/.asoundrc files (as 
well as many others I probably can't remember right now) from all sorts 
of tutorials I've found on the internet, and none really seems to be 
well written enough to help me /understand/ what I'm doing -- just 
things like "add this crazy incantation with a bunch of flags to some 
file -- that should work" -- unfortunately, this hasn't produced much in 
the way of results for me.  I know this sounds like me complaining (I'm 
really not -- just frustrated), but it's just really frustrating to have 
all these amazing applications at your fingertips and not even be able 
to use them because you haven't been able to track down some arcane 
setting somewhere (and I realize how hard it is to troubleshoot 
complicated problems via email -- and I really appreciate all the help 
I've gotten thus far).  In particular, I'd really like to use amSynth to 
create some sounds for a project I have coming up in a computers and 
music class I'm taking.  Everyone seems to be way ahead of me in knowing 
what specific files and things to look for when troubleshooting these 
types of things -- if someone would be willing to help me out or at 
least point me in the direction of something I could read that could at 
least let me integrate the many various things I've seen about getting 
alsa, jack, midi events and their interplay between soundcards and the 
kernel in general, it'd be greatly appreciated.  If someone would be 
willing to help me troubleshoot, I'd gladly supply the contents of any 
configuration file, system specs, etc. that you would need.

Thanks ever so much,
Bradley Campbell