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

[foltra at terra.cl]

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