On Mon, 2004-10-18 at 14:13 +0200, Felipe Alfaro Solana wrote:
On Oct 18, 2004, at 13:59, Ralf Ertzinger wrote:
Hi.
David Mohring heretic@ihug.co.nz wrote:
Even using the ALSA interface, Fedora defaults to sending/receiving applications audio direct to the hardware device, hogging the interface. By default audio output could go to ALSA or better yet a Dmix plug, where the source and destination could be selected and mixed together.
Maybe I did not understand ALSA fully, but: IMHO you will need dmix only when your sound hardware is not capable of hardware mixing (like mine is, for example). If it was, you would not need (or want, for that matter) to use dmix.
You are right... Some sound cards out there have several hardware audio channels and can perform HW sound mixing of up to a number of sound sources equal to its sound channels. For example, if the card has 4 HW channels it can mix up to 4 simultaneous sound sources.
Ok, how about giving the option to deploy audio as either 1) Direct to card hardware Card set up as /dev/dsp hw:0 etc 2) Software Mix Dmix set up as /dev/dsp hw:0 etc Following audio devices set up /dev/dspX hw:X etc And the future kernel hack 3) Multiuser Software Switch a /dev/tty like switch for /dev/dsp hw:0 to each users assigned /dev/dsp hw:0 etc - either hardware or dmix device.