How to find out what app is hogging the soundcard

[D. Michael McIntyre]

On Thursday 08 November 2007, hollunder at gmx.at wrote:

> Does anyone know how I can find out which app is using or hogging the
> soundcard?

Try running

  fuser /dev/snd/*

and see if you get any clues.

For example, I get:

/dev/snd/controlC2:  22203
/dev/snd/pcmC2D0c:   22203m
/dev/snd/pcmC2D0p:   22203m
/dev/snd/seq:         4698  8673 22200 22203

Then you can look at what the processes are in various ways.  Keeping it in 
the command line realm, you'd 

  ps 22203

and see

  PID TTY      STAT   TIME COMMAND
  22203 ?        SLsl     
  34:02 /usr/bin/jackd -R -dalsa -dhw:2 -r48000 -p256 -n2 -S

that JACK is hogging /dev/snd/controlC2 on my box.  I have no bliffin clue 
what any of the names in /dev/snd mean, but this can still be helpful for 
rooting out the card hog.
-- 
D. Michael McIntyre