On Sun, 2004-10-24 at 22:10 -0700, John L Fjellstad wrote:
Eric Gaumer <gaumerel@ecs.fullerton.edu> writes:
I think you are confusing the two. Alsa is a sound architecture but
esound is a sound daemon. Alsa makes sounds where as esound plays more
of a traffic cop role. Bottom line is that they serve two different
purposes when dealing with sound. Alsa plays the driver or module role.
Someday it might be able to do the job of a sound daemon as well but I
don't think this is the intent of the project.
I thought the never ALSA could play the role of 'traffic cop'? As in,
it can get input from different streams and then merge them before
sending it to the soundcard.
Or does sound daemons do more?
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.
I'm no sound expert by any means so take this with a grain of salt...