[linux-audio-user] Multiple outputs at the same time

Daniel Klein bringa at gmx.at
Fri Jul 25 13:21:00 EDT 2003


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



More information about the Linux-audio-user mailing list