On Wed, 2005-12-14 at 11:35 +0000, Rob Andrews wrote: > On 14-Dec-2005 11:31.20 (GMT), Rob Andrews wrote: > > > Ummm... this is bad. > > > Without arts support, how can I concurrently use both arts applications > > > (artsdsp OSS and/or KDE applications) and alsa applications (Amarok over > > > gstreamer) without having lock problems? > > http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php?page=DmixPlugin > > Sorry, my reply was supposed to be more verbose but I'm running on > autopilot this morning. > > dmix is an alsa helper for devices that don't support hardware mixing or > have fixed-frequency codecs (e.g. the 48000Hz fixed-frequency > Intel/VIA/SIS integrated audio devices). It downmixes and frequency > scales as required. Yeah, it does all that, but it's also the way you stop contention of the sound device[s]. You point _all_ programs that need to output sound at dmix, and then only dmix needs to talk directly to the sound hardware through alsa. This stops eg xmms from blocking helixplayer from blocking Flash in firefox, etc. This is what all the other OSs that actually have sound device arbitration do AFAIK. On Mac OS X, you _don't_ touch the hardware, you don't open /dev/dsp, period. You talk to CoreAudio (or Carbon's SoundManager), which handles mixing and resampling if required, and passes all audio to the device. Which is what we should be doing in Linux too. The audio situation without something like dmix arbitration is just horrific. Dan -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
