Sharing sound hardware

[Felipe Alfaro Solana]

On 5 Feb 2005, at 12:25, Dariusz J. Garbowski wrote:

> On 02/05/2005 10:49 AM, Ronald S. Bultje wrote:
>> Hi Ryan,
>> On Sat, 2005-02-05 at 03:10, Ryan Gammon wrote:
>>> Ideally IMHO dmix / asym would:
>> [..]
>>> - Open the sound device using sensible maximum capabilities of the  
>>> device in terms of sampling rate and # of channels, etc. The guys  
>>> who write our resamplers generally prefer to have helix doing any  
>>> sample rate conversion where possible:
>>> http://lists.helixcommunity.org/pipermail/audio-dev/2004-March/ 
>>> 000243.html
>> Would fixed-samplerate do (e.g. fixed to 48kHz)? 99% of the users  
>> won't
>> notice the difference if you're using a reasonably good resampler. On  
>> my
>> computer (don't know if this is generally true), dmix operates on a
>> fixed samplerate, regardless of playback.
>
> Please, no! This sounds really bad to me (pun intended ;-) I own a  
> card that can do hardware mixing and really don't like the idea of  
> "being punished" for that. Especially by something like upsampling  
> almost every sound I play from 44.1 to 48kHz. And yes, I will notice  
> (is it really 99% of the users who won't? where does this number come  
> from?) -- decent amplifier, cables and loudspeakers do just that: you  
> start noticing.
>
> The reason I'm really worried here is that I recall Colin Walters  
> saying that dmix will be on for everybody in FC4:
>
> https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2005-January/ 
> msg00614.html

AFAIK, dmix will use software mixing *only* if your sound card doesn't  
support hardware mixing.