Sharing sound hardware

Dariusz J. Garbowski thuforuk at yahoo.co.uk
Sat Feb 5 11:25:22 UTC 2005


On 02/05/2005 10:49 AM, Ronald S. Bultje wrote:
> Hi Ryan,
> 
> On Sat, 2005-02-05 at 03:10, Ryan Gammon wrote:
>>Ideally IMHO dmix / asym would:
> 
> [..]
> 
>>- Open the sound device using sensible maximum capabilities of the 
>>device in terms of sampling rate and # of channels, etc. The guys who 
>>write our resamplers generally prefer to have helix doing any sample 
>>rate conversion where possible:
>>http://lists.helixcommunity.org/pipermail/audio-dev/2004-March/000243.html
> 
> 
> Would fixed-samplerate do (e.g. fixed to 48kHz)? 99% of the users won't
> notice the difference if you're using a reasonably good resampler. On my
> computer (don't know if this is generally true), dmix operates on a
> fixed samplerate, regardless of playback.

Please, no! This sounds really bad to me (pun intended ;-) I own a card 
that can do hardware mixing and really don't like the idea of "being 
punished" for that. Especially by something like upsampling almost every 
sound I play from 44.1 to 48kHz. And yes, I will notice (is it really 
99% of the users who won't? where does this number come from?) -- decent 
amplifier, cables and loudspeakers do just that: you start noticing.

The reason I'm really worried here is that I recall Colin Walters saying 
that dmix will be on for everybody in FC4:

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2005-January/msg00614.html


Question: will there be a SIMPLE way (a script or HOWTO/FAQ would do) to 
turn dmix off for those whose soundcard can do hardware mixing so they 
can use their hardware the way it was intended to?

If so, *please* include a note how to do it in Release Notes for FC4.

This would make me happy enough to keep quiet even with dmix set on as 
default :-)

Regards,
Dariusz




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