Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Acrobat Reader blocks my audio system, WTF?

I wanted to play a song (yes I have a legally bought copy from which I made the mp3) in mplayer and got the following result:
$ mplayer "01 - Adiemus - Karl Jenkins.mp3"



[...]

open /dev/dsp: Device or resource busy
After a few researches, I found:
# lsof /dev



[...]

acroread 32723 christophe 61r CHR 116,33 11606 /dev/snd/timer

acroread 32723 christophe 62u CHR 116,16 12023 /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p
An open document in Acrobat Reader was blocking my sound system. Why? No idea. I closed Acrobat Reader and opened it anew: no problem anymore.

For reference, it's a Ubuntu 8.04 on a PC, with a typical AC97 integrated chip. Package alsa-base is 1.0.16-0ubuntu4 and Acrobat Reader itself is 7.0.

EDIT1 30/04: I should say Adobe Reader, not Acrobat Reader, the former name.
EDIT2 30/04: The package acroread is version 7.0.9-0.0.ubuntu0.7.04+medibuntu2

3 comments:

  1. Maybe the reader only tried to play a beep and didn't release the device after that.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I never heard a beep from acroread and I wonder why it would beep... Anyway, I'll try to get a better idea if the bug reoccurs.

    ReplyDelete

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