"default" sound drivers vs. ALSA?

[Marc Schwartz]

On Mon, 2004-02-23 at 22:20, Alexandre Strube wrote:
> Em Ter, 2004-02-24 às 00:26, Marc Schwartz escreveu:
> 
> > > Some drivers works, but without multiple channels. My via-82xx, for
> > > instance, when using standard FC1 sound drivers, keep gaim sounds on a
> > > sort of queue when I hear music with XMMS. The music stops, every single
> > > sound event from gaim is played in a row, and then xmms complains about
> > > sound device being busy.
> > > Its a via-82xx sound chip, and works perfectly with alsa.
> > Take a look here:
> > http://fedoranews.org/contributors/andre_costa/alsa/
> > for some hints on how to get multiple apps playing together using ALSA.
> 
> I was exactly explaining to Mitch that alsa drivers don't suffer from
> this issue, the opposite from the old drivers...

D'oh!  :-)


> > I now have gaim and xmms behaving well together. 
> 
> Weird, I didn't do anything to make them work together after I've
> installed alsa and xmms-alsa..

It might be unique to certain audio chip sets.

I had exactly the issue described on the FN site after setting up alsa
(including xmms-alsa).  Whichever app had the sound output device first,
the other had to wait. If I had xmms or mplayer running and logged into
gaim, gaim would seemingly hang until I closed the other app.

The solution on the FN site has solved that problem, which was a
non-issue previously using OSS/ESD.

> > Now, if I could just get Evolution's new mail notification to
> > work....anyone have any hints on that?
> 
> ? Didn't even know that this existed :-)

Yeah. I am guessing that Evo uses ESD? to play it's notification sound
file. Thus if I have another audio app running, no sound from Evo. At
least from my investigation so far, short of recompiling Evo, I don't
see a work around along the lines of the gaim/xmms approach, since Evo
has no sound output device configuration file/setting as far as I can
see.

I had this same problem with xmms if I used the OSS output plugin
instead of the ESD plug-in. No sound from Evo with the OSS output in
xmms.

Perhaps this is different in the FC2 versions (ie. Evo 1.5.x), since FC2
uses ALSA by default.

Of course, I'd rather see the infamous Evo C&P bug fix distributed
first...that is still a PITA  ;-)

Marc