CrunchBang Linux

Hi! New to crunchbang and loving it, but I'm having a couple of issues involving audio and mpd/mpc:

1. IMPROVED When I first boot, one of three things happens:

• I have no sound at all

• I have sound but the volume control keys I set up have no effect (I set them up using openbox's rc.xml. I can post the exact entries, but I know for a fact they're correct).

• Everything works exactly as it should. This is definitely the least common situation

To rectify the problem, I reload the snd-hda-intel module using "sudo modprobe -r snd-hda-intel" and "sudo modprobe snd-hda-intel". Sometimes it takes a couple of rounds of doing so to make it work.

IMPROVEMENT:
Per a post I googled up, I edited /etc/rc.local and added the following lines right before 'exit 0':

rmmod snd_hda_intel
modprobe snd_hda_intel

Now I always seems to have sound when I boot, but it still sometimes doesn't recognize my shortcut keys until I modprobe a time or two. I think it's because alsa is not recognizing the device, only OSS is. I have no clue what to do about this.

2. SOLVED! For the most part, only one process can play audio at once. For example, if I'm playing a game with sound and attempt to "mpc play", it says "ERROR: problems opening audio device". If I quit the game, mpc works properly. This can be especially annoying when a process hangs on to control of the audio device even when it's not actually playing audio. IceWeasel does this occasionally, forcing me to quit it, start mpc, then relaunch.

I understand this may be a fundamental limitation of the audio system used in crunchbang, but I'm almost certain I remember hearing pidgin alert noises while listening to music at one point. I could be wrong. Regardless, I have no interest in installing PulseAudio. If that's the only option for mixing multiple audio streams, I'll simply do without.

SOLUTION:
Firstly, as it turns out, this was just a problem with mpd. Streams mix just fine from other sources. To fix it for mpd, I commented out all of the device section in my mpd.conf (in my home folder).

3. I have the following lines in my autostart.sh:

## Start mpd and prepare mpc
(mpd && (mpc ls | mpc add) && mpc random on) &

However, when I first boot, mpc has no songs and the mpd process is owned by, if I recall correctly, user "mpd". I have to sudo to kill it. Once I do so and manually type in the commands from autostart.sh, mpc and mpd behave as expected (once I fix audio issue #1)