play sound on Ubuntu 10.4. (pulse audio?)

[News123]

Hi,

>From a python script I'd like to play sound on Ubuntu 10.4


I made two attempts:

the first one is drectly writing to '/dev/audio', which works, but only
if no other application plays audio (like for example amarok)

The second attempt was playing audio via ALSA.
The application doesn't fail, but I can hear nothing

Now I don't know how to continue


More details below


1.) write directly to /dev/audio
====================================

def Beep_dev_au(frequency, duration, amplitude=10):
    sample = 8000
    half_period = int(sample/frequency/2)
    beep = chr(amplitude)*half_period+chr(0)*half_period
    beep *= int(duration*frequency/1000)
    audio = file('/dev/audio', 'wb')
    audio.write(beep)
    audio.close()


the function works well and beeps if no other application is playing audio.

When running it while for example amarok is playing audio, it will fail
with:

IOError: [Errno 16] Device or resource busy: '/dev/audio'



2. Accessing audio via ALSA
=============================
import alsaaudio
#
def Beep_alsa(frequency, duration=1000, amplitude=1):
    sample = 44100
    pcm = alsaaudio.PCM(type=alsaaudio.PCM_PLAYBACK)
    pcm.setchannels(1)
    pcm.setrate(sample)
    pcm.setformat(alsaaudio.PCM_FORMAT_S16_LE)
    half_period = int(sample/frequency/2)
    beep = (chr(0)+chr(amplitude))*half_period+(chr(0)*2)*half_period
    print "L",len(beep)
    beep *= int(duration*sample/half_period/2000)

    pcm.setperiodsize(160)
    for idx in xrange(0,len(beep),320):
        frm = beep[idx:idx+320]
        if len(frm) == 320:
            pcm.write(frm)


this function doesn't raise an exception, but  hear nothing.

I'm a little lost.

As far as I understand Ubuntu uses the pulse audio system by default.
(That's probably why ALSA is not working)



What would be the correct way to play audio on such a system or even better.

What would be the way to detect how to play audio on a linux system
without knowing ufront whether the system uses pulse, ALSA or whatever?


Thanks for your suggestions.


N