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Re: esound clobbers OSS?



On Sat, May 06, 2006 at 08:31:55PM -0400, Marty wrote:
> Paul Johnson wrote:
> >On Saturday 06 May 2006 16:47, Marty wrote:
> >>My system is stock Sarge, with Gnome and stock Debian kernel.
> >>
> >>I rarely use OSS programs, and when I did try to use one recently I found
> >>that OSS was not working.  After some investigation I found that it 
> >>started
> >>working again after I unchecked the "enable sound server startup" option 
> >>in
> >>the Gnome applications->desktop preferences->sound dialog box.  Now all
> >>programs seem to have sound, but I can only run one OSS program at a time.
> >>(ALSA programs still share the soundcard.)
> >
> >This isn't an OSS or esound limitation.  Your sound card can only play one 
> >sound at a time.  Esound can work around this for esound-enabled programs. 
> >But what you really want in the long run is something like a SoundBlaster 
> >128 Live!, which costs only $30 and can play many sounds at once.
> >
> 
> I don't recall having this problem with OSS programs before, therefore I 
> concluded, maybe incorrectly, that esound had been mixing OSS program sound.
> 
> Another twist is that I'm not using real OSS, but ALSA OSS emulation.  
> Obviously
> that crucial detail should have been in my original post.
> 

I think you have to turn on oss mixing using the dmix (dmixer?)
plugin which provides software mixing for single input sound cards. there is a how-to or 2 at the alsa site. google on dmix plugin
and oss and alsa should find it. you' set up mixing in a .asoundrc
file.

hth

A

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