Simultaneous sounds with ALSA?

[Andre Costa]

On Thu, 08 Apr 2004 05:32:15 +0200
Christoph Wickert <christoph.wickert at web.de> wrote:

> Sorry, but I think are wrong: With alsa there's no need for a
> sounddaemon like arts or esd. Softwaremixing needs additional hardware
> resources (CPU and Mem), so I prefer hardware mixing.

Agreed, but sometimes this is not an option ;)

> And (sorry:-)) I think Chadley is wrong, too. If alsa is set up with
> oss-emulation layer it is completely transparent, you can play
> multiple sounds at once without changing to another dsp device.

Yeah, but still you have to configure devices properly. It took me a
while to properly configure some apps (xmms, gxine, play) to use ALSA so
that they would benefit from software mixing. I registered my
experiences on FedoraNEWS.org hoping it could help others:
http://fedoranews.org/contributors/andre_costa/alsa

[snip]
> (If your card is does not support hardwaremixing forget about this
> mail and use esd or arts :-)

Not so fast, chief ;) There's life with software mixing too. Native
hardware support is of course _much_ better, but that doesn't mean you
cannot take advantage of ALSA's capabilities (after all, being able to
rely on sound driver directly for software mixing should be much better
than relying on a sound daemon).

HTH

Andre

-- 
Andre Oliveira da Costa