[LAU] Hideous dmix, alsa, jack, realtime and mixing mess

AAAARRRGGHHHH!!! FOR GOODNESS SAKE!!!!!!! Hardware manufacturers are now driving me totally insane. Are they all completely brain dead? How in the world is anyone actually supposed to use the appalling software sound cards they put in laptops and on motherboards these days? My previous laptop, a T20, had a CS46xx card, which was amazing- it had a hardware mixer. Actually it wasn't amazing. It was an ordinary sound card. The cards which don't have hardware mixing are useless pieces of ******* ****. I now have an IBM ThinkPad T23, which has one of the censored types of sound cards above, which is intel8x0 based. It is not capable of hardware mixing. At the time I made this "upgrade" ALSA did not ship with dmix enabled by default, and it drove me totally insane trying to get it to work (more on why later). In the end I gave up and settled with one audio application at a time. Then one day, to my delight I read that ALSA was now shipping with dmix enabled by default. It sortof worked, but to this day I have not actually been able to use it properly, because any application which doesn't use dmix blocked the soundcard anyway, so if any one of my applications didn't use dmix I was back to one at a time. (I'm looking at YOU, flash plugin (which, incidentally, also comes under the category of "useless ****ing ****")- more on that later as well) With the addition of a midi keyboard I now also have the problem of realtime. So I added jack. And my current jack setup isn't acceptable either. The main issue with jack is again the lack of hardware mixing. I have to manually start the jack server when I want it and shut it down if I want to play audio from any other application. Actually, whilst I'm at it could somebody please explain why fluidsynth --> ALSA lags, yet fluidsynth --> jack --> ALSA does not? How in the world does adding yet another layer of software actually SPEED UP the sound output??!?!?!?!? Anyway, with the addition of MIDI I then find out that these cheap software soundcards are also lacking MIDI sequencers, requiring software to do that as well. Fine. I eventually got that working, and even in (almost) realtime. But now I want to play along to an mp3 track. And here a large number of unacceptable hacks and compromises combine, eventually forcing me to go right back to the beginning. My initial thought was to try and get my other applications to use jack directly, which would have the added bonus of mixing them nicely. Great in theory, but xmms-jack didn't work and it looks like most other applications will require similar hacks, which for the most part are not available. I can't even get some applications to use ALSA instead of OSS, so I don't really stand much chance of getting them to use jack. And then I found this... http://www.articleworld.org/index.php/How_to_force_ALSA_applications_to_use… which looked great, but it uses /etc/asound.conf and ~/.asoundrc. Why is this a problem? Well, aside from the horrific memories it brings back of trying to get dmix to work, I am never actually sure if either of those two files are actually being used, if the syntax is correct, or if the particular contents I found on the internet should actually work. I am convinced that there is some voodoo involved. The site given above also mentions restarting the alsa rc script to make sure that the changes take place, but since there isn't actually an alsa service this seems like complete rubbish to me. The init script for alsa just saves and loads volume levels. Besides, non root users can't run rc scripts, so that's even more pointless with asoundrc files. I have a 486 in my loft with an ISA AWE32 which I am sure can do better than this. So, to summarise: 1. How do you tell an application to use dmix (an old and probably irrelevant question, but I want to know anyway)? 2. Why does adding an extra layer of software (jack) in between fluidsynth and ALSA speed up the audio output? 3. How do I get proprietary software (which for some reason all still uses OSS)(flash, teamspeak) to use ALSA? 3a. Or at the very least get the flash plugin to release the sound device once it's finished, without requiring the whole of firefox to be restarted? 4. How do I check that /etc/asound.conf and/or ~/.asoundrc are actually being used? 5. How can I force applications to use jack (at the least I need xmms, vlc, mplayer and preferably flash)? If I buy a pcmcia soundcard is it worth it? Any recommendations? Will it have hardware mixing and a hardware synth? Why are they so damn expensive? I'm currently looking at 70 pounds on ebay for a Creative Audigy 2, which seems totally ridiculous seeing as my midi controller only cost 50. I'm loathed to buy a USB one (especially as I only have USB1.1)- anyone got any comments on those? The whole point of buying a midi controller instead of a normal keyboard was that it was supposed to be cheaper and more portable. It doesn't seem to be going that way. Any suggestions? Simon