On Mon, 2004-10-18 at 14:13 +0200, Felipe Alfaro Solana wrote:
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.
Having to configure this manually is a nonstarter. It's very clear that the right thing to do is automatically use hardware mixing if possible, and otherwise fall back to software mixing.
If that isn't possible, then we need to use software mixing by default for all the normal nondemanding sound cases since it will always work; and reserve hardware mixing for complex audio apps that want to play with ALSA directly, or let users turn it on manually by editing some text file, if they care about the performance win.
Users that just want to play mp3's aren't going to understand a bunch of how-is-mixing-implemented configuration nonsense.
Havoc