25 Jul
2003
25 Jul
'03
3:20 p.m.
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