Re: esound and alsa not compatible?
Eric Gaumer <gaumerel@ecs.fullerton.edu> writes:
> Alsa cannot play multiple audio streams simultaneously. From what I
> understand, this is more of a hardware limitation than an alsa
> limitation. They claim that some sound cards can do automatic hardware
> mixing. If your card can't do this then there is a plugin called "dmix"
> that does software mixing (i.e. allow sounds to play simultaneously) .
> I've never tried it. Just search "alsa dmix" for plenty of how-to's. I
> would imagine just using esd or arts would be easier and work flawlessly
> at the moment. I think a lot of Gnome apps are probably programmed to
> use esound. Give it a try... it can't hurt.
Actually, that's what I meant. With my Soundblaster card, I had
hardware mixing with ALSA. On my laptop now, I do software mixing with
the dmix plugin, also with ALSA. And it works fine. So, doesn't that
mean that Alsa can play multiple audio streams, as long as you set it up?
And I guess I was wondering what a 'real' sound daemon would bring to
the table above this?
I actuall run esd when running gtk windowmanagers (GNOME,
Enlightenment), and it sounds terrible, so I usually just pipe the xmms
output directly to ALSA. I actually do it everywhere if an app supports
it.
--
John L. Fjellstad
web: http://www.fjellstad.org/ Quis custodiet ipsos custodes
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