10 Jan
2005
10 Jan
'05
3:36 p.m.
Hi Dave,
My laptop includes a NeoMagic 256A/V audio/video
chip,
i.e., no hardware mixing. So under normal circumstances I
get to use one soundapp at a time. Here's my
$HOME/.asoundrc file that gives me software audio
multiplexing :
[...]
An example usage might look like this:
xine -A alsa foo.mpg
aplay -f cd -D default foo.wav
If I understand correctly, it does create some virtual cards
based on one hardware card.
Will ALSA assign each application a virtual card
automatically, or does the application try all virtual cards
until it finds a free one?
Is the number of virtual cards limitated in any way, or are
they created automatically/dynamically?
Performance is improved on my machine (a PII 366) if
I
change the sample rate to 32000. At 44.1 kHz the little box
just barely keeps up whie playing a movie at the same time
I run a major soundapp. There are probably other
interesting tweaks, but this example might get someone
started in the right direction.
I think the Windoze system audio mixer does the same thing
as dmix but rather transparently. It is a pain to have to
write a specific asoundrc file, but it's not an awful
pain...
Unfortunately, the common user will not be able to do so, and
to be honest, I'll need many hours to create an asoundrc for
myself.
Furthermore, it's a pity when dmix is only present on some
single machines where the user has created an asoundrc file
manually. There seems to be an interesting technology, but
noone does use it.
What about creating a shell script which helps us in creating
an /etc/asound.conf resp. an ~/.asoundrc? It'd be great even
if distributors woult use it as a backend to install dmix on
every machine.
(dp thanks Takashi Iwai for explaining dmix to him
over and
over again...)
So thanks a lot for spreading his knowledge to further
people ;-) .
Best regards
ce