Running Opensuse 10.2 with H9.0.794

In the audio panel I'm loading in a wav file -

under the Test tab I don't hear anything and the controls go back to stop immediately after pressing play.

under the Realtime tab I see the waveform in the timeline, but don't hear anything when I play the animation.

I'm able to play this audio file using realplayer with no problem. The file is 16-bit Integer (Little Endian), Mono, 44.100 kHz

I'm sure it's something simple I'm missing, can anyone give me a clue?

There are a few different sound schemes in linux, as I recall Houdini plays back in the standard one though, so if you're hearing sound it's probably ok.

The realtime toggle needs to be turned on so that the sound plays back at the correct speed. Otherwise there will be skipping etc.

As for the actual sound tab, once a CHOP is loaded onto the timeline I would use the “scrub” tab. See if that works. Do you see the green-to-red volume stuff on the audio tab?

By the way, it would be great if Houdini could output to jacks!!

andrewlowell
There are a few different sound schemes in linux, as I recall Houdini plays back in the standard one though, so if you're hearing sound it's probably ok.

The realtime toggle needs to be turned on so that the sound plays back at the correct speed. Otherwise there will be skipping etc.

As for the actual sound tab, once a CHOP is loaded onto the timeline I would use the “scrub” tab. See if that works. Do you see the green-to-red volume stuff on the audio tab?

By the way, it would be great if Houdini could output to jacks!!

I do have realtime selected, but I'm using the “File” button instead of “CHOP”, any reason why File wouldn't work?

I would definately double-check-test the actual file to make sure Houdini is processing it correctly before the sound is output. For instance, if it's a 32 bit wav it won't work.

Try to make a new CHOPs network, a file CHOP, and read it in. If that goes ok, then select the audio playback from that CHOP. If you hear stuff, using the scrub method with real-time-enabled .. I would guess the file parameter on the audio-playback-thing will work too. If not it's either a linux sound configuration issue, or maybe a Houdini bug, but I'm guessing it's either a file format issue, or a linux audio issue.

here's two example scenes, do you hear sound with any of this stuff?

Andrew, thanks for the test cases. I got the same exact results with your files that I had with mine. So I'm thinking this is some kind of KDE/Houdini interaction. I looked at my KDE settings and the KDE control of the sound system is supposed to auto-suspend if it is idle for more than 5 seconds. If I understand this setting correctly, then Houdini should be able to access the sound system. I'm not well versed in KDE so I'm not sure what else to check.

I can't be of much help here, I'm not a Linux guru, and am using Ubuntu studio with Gnome (works fine).

Anyone?

I *finally* figured this out after many hours of messing with it.

It looks like Houdini uses the OSS server instead of ALSA (why, I don't know since it is so old). My system does not support OSS, however there is a wrapper called aoss that will teach an OSS application how to play nice with ALSA.

In the hfs bin directory there is a script called “startupScriptLINUX” where I changed the last line

from: exec $0-bin “$@”
to: exec aoss $0-bin “$@”

I'm not sure if this is the best place to make this change, but now I get full audio out of Houdini. Yay!

yeah I definitely think it should support jacks (and maybe ASIO for windows)

(also one more suggestion .. maybe get those CHOPs sample rates up to 384khz)

I think opensuse does install the alsa oss compatibility libraries. If not you could add them yourself. You could also check on the cli with lsmod if there are any alsaoss modules loaded. I can't recall any sound issues with opensuse and houdini…