On Mi, 24 nov 10, 09:40:05, Philipp Kern wrote:
> On 2010-11-24, Andrei Popescu <andreimpopescu@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> The solution is to multiplex/mix in software, most commonly done with
> >> pulseaudio these days.
> >> Don't you have pulseaudio installed?
> > ALSA is using dmix by default, but not all applications play well with=20
> > it (e.g. mpd).
>
> dmix is user-local, not system-wide. So the applications need to be run by the
> same user to take advantage of dmix (which isn't exactly common with mpd).
Not in my experience. mpd by default is run by user mpd, but dmix works
just fine if I comment-out a few lines:
,----[ /etc/mpd.conf ]
| audio_output {
| type "alsa"
| name "My ALSA Device"
| #device "hw:0,0" # optional
| #format "44100:16:2" # optional
| #mixer_device "default" # optional
| #mixer_control "PCM" # optional
| #mixer_index "0" # optional
| }
`----
From a quick web search it seems like dmix uses 48 kHz by default and
mpd has two choices:
1. use alsa directly (bypass dmix)
2. resample the audio (usually 44,1 kHz), which uses some CPU[1]
Since mpd is used a lot on low spec machines the default is 1.
There is also a /etc/asound.conf snippet floating around the web to
configure dmix to use 44,1 kHz, but it doesn't work on my squeeze
machine :(
[1] on a PIII-500 MHz this is about 25% according to htop which,
depending on what else the machine has to do can be significant
Kind regards,
Andrei
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