Re: Simultaneous sounds, again (solved, probably)
I am pleased to say that I now managed to get simultaneous sound
working in Debian, almost perfectly.
My "sound compatibility matrix" is now:
mp/s xmms youtube skype
mp/s OK OK OK OK
xmms OK X OK OK
youtube OK OK OK OK
skype OK OK OK N/A
mp/s means mplayer with sdl audio output, as before. I had to set
this *both* by a line in ~/.mplayer/config:
ao=sdl
and through the GUI (gmplayer, preferences, audio). It appears
both are necessary.
The X in the combination xmms-xmms should probably be N/A, because
xmms just does not allow running 2 instances of itself
simultaneously.
Several reactions (on-list and off-list) suggested using a sound
daemon, but according to the 31 August 2007 entry on the
"buglandia" blog (http://buglandia.blogspot.com), sound daemons
(like esd and arts) are now *outdated*, and even somewhat *evil*
("fundamentally wrong").
The solution is software sound mixing. Apparently, sounds can be
mixed by the hardware (the sound card) or by software. Windows
always uses software sound mixing by default. So sound mixing
always works on Windows, no matter what hardware you have. Linux,
developed by and for tech types, tries to use hardware mixing if
the sound card can support it (but by no means all of them do),
because this is more efficient.
Software mixing became something of a stepchild. But it appears
that in the more modern versions (of Linux and alsa; certainly in
Sid) software mixing works now. The flightgear wiki
(http://tinyurl.com/38smlf) explains this better than I can.
To make it work, I followed a recipe on the alsa wiki
(http://tinyurl.com/2vhoqt), because the recipe on buglandia did
not work for me. What did was:
-- make sure there is NO /etc/asound.conf or ~/.asoundrc files
present on the system.
-- export two environment variables:
export SDL_AUDIODRIVER=alsa
export AUDIODEV=plug:dmix
(you can put both commands in ~/.bash_profile).
-- make sure that mplayer uses sdl for audio output.
-- make sure there are no sound daemons running (jack, esd, arts,
whatever).
It will now work after you log out/log in, and perhaps after
restarting alsa (/etc/init.d/alsasound restart). Well, I hope it
does. It now does for me.
Regards, Jan
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