Hi Daniel! You should go alsa 0.9, for this try planetccrma for making the upgrade easy. Alsa has the dmix plugin for mixing sources. Haven't checked this, i'm jackified :-) On Fri, 25 Jul 2003, Daniel Klein wrote: > Hello, > > again, excuse the very basic nature of my question, I should have found these > answers myself, but I tried long and just couldn't. Maybe the internet as > such dislikes me. > > I want to do something very basic. Basically that is let multiple programs > talk to my soundcard at the same time. Simple example: XMMS is playing a > song, someone on IRC uses a keyword to page me, my XChat perl script calls > some form of command line mp3/wav playback program and plays a sound that > gets my attention. Or XMMS is playing and I access a webpage with a Flash > animation. Or the aforementioned paging situation happens while watching a > movie with mplayer. Currently, none of those are possible to me. I must say I > am very ignorant in this area still, am really willing to educate myself but > find myself unable to find anything BASIC on this. A little FAQ on basic > terminology would be grand already. What do you call things like ALSA, Esound > and what not? How does stuff like KDE's aRts fit in? > > Anyway, I am running ALSA 0.5. I have tried to upgrade to an ALSA 0.9x once, > but I remember faintly there were serious problems, so I tried to circumvent > that upgrade for the time being. Will an ALSA 0.9x version offer me this > functionality of multiple sound sources at the same time? I used esound once > too, while I'm absolutely foggy as to how that worked. I installed it, told > XMMS to talk to esound and then used a play utility that came along with > esound. That's how I solved the XMMS is playing + notify sound from XChat > should play situation. But esound seems to have the latency of a really tired > old man, and that looked plain retarded with the little visualization window > of XMMS. I know I know, not the end of the world, but other programs also > didn't like to talk to esound (including mplayer). Will I need to upgrade to > ALSA 0.9 then? Is that the standard right now? What other options do I have? > > Again, if you can just point me to a general FAQ about all this, please by any > means do so. > > Many thanks, > > Daniel
