Simultanous Sounds? (Hardware vs. software mixing)

[Christoph Wickert]

Am Mo, den 15.03.2004 schrieb Mark Limburg um 14:52:
> Howdy,
> 
> On Tue, 2004-03-16 at 00:13, Wolfgang wrote:
> > > Any ideas on how to have two (or more) applications be able to play
> > > sounds at the same time?  When I have XMMS playing Internet radio, I
> > > can't get system sounds, effects in Frozen Bubble or UT/Q3A, etc.  I've
> > > tried other variations also .. all with no success.  Another example
> > > I've seen is my 'new mail' sound has rung out just as I'm starting to
> > > play Chromium, and Chromium didn't have any sound.  I quit it, started
> > > it again, and it was there.
> > > 
> > > What sound daemon should I be using, esound, OSS, ALSA .. and how do I
> > > set these up?  And links to web pages to help?
> 
> > What Sound card are you using???
> > 
> > I have a Creative Audigy, and it works fine for me. I hear all the
> > system sounds, even when I play UT2K4-Demo etc. It may be, that the
> > sound card is limited in the number of simultaneous sounds it can
> > produce (or it's an old 16Bit card). The Audigy can play 32 sounds at
> > once.
> 
> Running the onboard sound from an ASUS nForce2 mobo.  Very very nice
> sound on the XP side of the fence ... so I doubt that's the specific
> issue.

In general you have two possibilities:

1. Software mixing: Use esd if you are a Gnome user, arts if you are
running KDE. If there are apps that don't want to use the daemon you can
still try esddsp and artsdsp (I used to run RealPlayer with artsdsp
since it did not support arts output)

2. Hardware mixing: See
http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/index.php3?vendor=All#matrix, if
your card supports hardware mixing (look for "(4)" in the "Notes"
column).
If it does install alsa. RPMs for Fedora are available from fedora.us,
Dag Wieers and freshrpms. With alsa there's no more need for a sound
daemon, it uses the capabilities of your soundcard and does not need
additional cpu/memory ressources.

This is why I got a SB Live 5.1 and everything is working great now.

Christoph