[CentOS] Sound drop out with totem. mplayer Can't open audio device /dev/dsp

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Sunday 12 February 2012 18:03:03 Ljubomir Ljubojevic wrote:
> On 02/12/2012 05:07 PM, Mark LaPierre wrote:
> > Hey all.
> > 
> > This morning I found that my audio playback is randomly sprinkled with
> > sound skips and dropouts.  I went to /var/log/yum.log and found this:
> > 
> > Feb 09 20:18:22 Updated: lame-3.99.4-2.el6.rf.i686
> > 
> > I'm not saying that caused the problem but it's all I could find that
> > changed.
> 
> lame-3.99.4-2.el6.rf.i686 is RepoForge package, and if he is the
> culprit, you have to take it on their mailing list.

Lame should not be responsible for the missing /dev/dsp. It is likely that 
something else got updated as well (what else is in the yum.log?), or that 
something crashed (pulseaudio, alsa, the kernel... :-) ).

The simplest way is to try to logout and login, and see if that helps. If not, 
reboot. If not, reboot to an older kernel. If not, read logs for pulseaudio 
etc.

Btw, I am writing off the top of my head here, but I think that mplayer should 
not even try to use /dev/dsp. Try it with

  mplayer -ao pulse file.wav

That should force mplayer to use pulseaudio (which should be the default by 
now, IIRC). If necessary, put it in mplayer's config file.

HTH, :-)
Marko