Proposal: Rationalizing Fedora Audio

[Felipe Alfaro Solana]

On Oct 18, 2004, at 13:59, Ralf Ertzinger wrote:

> Hi.
>
> David Mohring <heretic at 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.