Re: Good documentation on Sound ?
On Thu, 06 May 2004, Kirk Strauser wrote:
> At 2004-05-06T08:42:19Z, Uwe Dippel <udippel@uniten.edu.my> writes:
>
> > Actually, there are no problems here for the time being. But I'd like to
> > understand a bit more on this 'Kernel-based' ALSA, esd, OSS, etc. I tried
> > to google and around here, but what I get are zealots telling me that OSS
> > is s**t, or esd is just as bad or ALSA, which - of course ! 'sucks'. And
> > I'd have to use the only good one .... !
>
> No link, but a quick rundown:
[ . . .]
> 2) ESD and ARTS are "sound servers" that accept requests from programs to
> play a sound, and then pass those sounds to the kernel sound drivers
> above. The majority of Gnome programs talk to ESD, and most (all?) KDE
> programs talk to ARTS. Others, like XMMS, can use other one (or none!).
>
> The main reason for having the intermediate sound server is that Unix
> kernel sound drivers have traditionally been single-channel. That is,
> only one program could write to /dev/dsp at a time, so you couldn't
> listen to music and still hear other sound events at the same time. ESD
> and ARTS can accept multiple channels at once, multiplex them, and then
> dump the unified stream to /dev/dsp. They also add other, less used
> functions like the ability to send an audio stream via network to a sound
> server on another machine. For example, you could have a little computer
> hooked to your home stereo, and could redirect the output of your MP3
> player to that computer so you could listen to it via presumably better
> speakers than you'd have on your PC.
If you have a quasi-modern sound card/chipset, alsa can also let your sound
card do the multiplexing in hardware. ie. you don't need to run esd/arts
anymore unless you want the funky network-stream capabilities.
Look up your card/chipset on <http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/> and
look for 'hardware mixing supported'.
-- Brad
--
Brad Sawatzky <bds9e@virginia.edu>
University of Virginia Physics Department
Ph: (434) 924-6580 Fax: (434) 924-7909
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