On Wed, 2006-05-17 at 14:28 -0500, Gain Paolo Mureddu wrote:
Lee Revell escribió:
The problem you describe has been solved since
about ALSA 1.0.9.
ALSA uses software mixing by default for all devices that require it,
and OSS apps must be run with the "aoss" wrapper to make use of it.
Apps that don't work with this simply need to be fixed.
Lee
I realize this, however as a sys admin I still have to struggle to
explain to users why popular applications such as Skype makes their
system produce no sound whatsoever or why do their media player stops
woking whenever they have open Skype or why do the messages stop
sounding when... etc, etc. That is what I meant. Not that technically
this wasn't possible. Still I've been unable to make some OSS
applications play nice with aoss (for instance the Quake3 game, the
TeamSpeak VoIP app, Skype, etc).
Yep, it sucks. The impossibility of making in-kernel OSS emulation with
the advanced features of ALSA is probably the #1 unresolved sound issue
afflicting the Linux desktop. The only solution I see is to get these
apps fixed. Skype and Macromedia (flash plugin) have been promising
native ALSA support for some time now - maybe that will happen
someday ;-). We should try to educate closed source vendors that OSS is
not a reasonable option.
You could help by trying to figure out why these apps won't work with
aoss - there are a few open ALSA bug reports with lots of info already.
These problems obviously do not happen
with hardware mixing capable hardware (like aging and trusty Sound
Blaster Live! Value), and as such , we've decided to try and see which
commodity audio solutions support hardware mixing beyond ALi and some
VIA chipsets (BTW, does any body know if/when the Envy series of chips
will support HW mixing, or if they even do HW mixing in Windows?... I
was asked the other day about this)
I don't think anyone has designed a new hardware mixing device in years.
It's all single-access with software mixing these days because it makes
the hardware cheaper. The Envy stuff will never support hardware mixing
because it works on Windows without it ;-)
Lee