Simultaneous sounds with ALSA?

[Christoph Wickert]

Am Do, den 08.04.2004 schrieb Andre Costa um 15:08:
> On Thu, 08 Apr 2004 05:32:15 +0200
> Christoph Wickert <christoph.wickert at web.de> wrote:
> 
> > Sorry, but I think are wrong: With alsa there's no need for a
> > sounddaemon like arts or esd. Softwaremixing needs additional hardware
> > resources (CPU and Mem), so I prefer hardware mixing.
> 
> Agreed, but sometimes this is not an option ;)

Yes, but I think this was mentioned in my mail.

> 
> > And (sorry:-)) I think Chadley is wrong, too. If alsa is set up with
> > oss-emulation layer it is completely transparent, you can play
> > multiple sounds at once without changing to another dsp device.
> 
> Yeah, but still you have to configure devices properly. It took me a
> while to properly configure some apps (xmms, gxine, play) to use ALSA so
> that they would benefit from software mixing. I registered my
> experiences on FedoraNEWS.org hoping it could help others:
> http://fedoranews.org/contributors/andre_costa/alsa

I read your article and it's very helpful. (BTW: I found a typo in line
6 "confifuration".)

Nevertheless there is NO REAL NEED to configure all the applications as
you did. In that case the oss-compatibility layer will do it's job.

I did not configure anything, so all my applications are set up to use
oss. I don't not what functionality I should be missing (well maybe some
Dolby 5.1), I still can have simultaneous sounds...

Christoph