Hi Kai, > Actually this is not quite correct. Dmix is part of > standard ALSA and is thus available on any recent Linux > system. > > You are of course right that dmix is not commonly > configured to be part of default plugins. Yep, you're right. It is installed, but of course I meant that per default an asoundrc is missing most often. > But most ALSA > apps allow you to specify which soundcard to use (the usual > implicit choice is 'default'). If you specify "plug:dmix", > you'll get dmix output in most cases (unless user has > overridden the asoundrc configuration). > > For example: > aplay -Dplug:dmix foo.wav > alsaplayer -o alsa -d plug:dmix > ecasound -i foo.wav -o alsa,plug:dmix Thanks for pointing this out. I'm still not experienced enough concerning ALSA and DMIX. I tried to write an asoundrc (which should not only enable DMIX but also order my cards in a certain order), but at some point I gave up ;-) . > This works on my system with vanilla alsa-lib-1.0.4 (quite > old version in fact) without absolutely no modifications to > any ALSA configuration files (I don't even have a > ~/.asoundrc on this machine). So I assume this should work > out-of-the-box on any system that has recent ALSA (SuSE > systems, FC2 and newer, Mandrake 10 and so on). > > More info at: > http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php?page=DmixPlugin Yeah, I already read it. But still it requires manual work. So, I thouht about a small script which could create an asoundrc automatically, then I tried to tweak the alsaconf script, the I saw it needs some rewriting and refactoring, and then I gave up ;-) . > PS I think dmix is _the_ solution for "desktop sound > mixing". Together with JACK they form a killer combo. :) Do you use both at the same time? Jack is running all day and using DMIX, while maybe artsd or esound is running in parallel for desktop audio? > I > use JACK when making music (ability to route audio between > apps, transport control), and dmix when listening to mp3s > (wide application support, no need to run nor configure any > servers; still great performance ... also latency-wise!). Is DMIX transparent to any ALSA aware application, or does an application need some coding to use DMIX, or is it needed to invoke the application always with the plug:DMIX parameter? It would be cool if it were transparent to the user. Thanks & best regards ce
