[linux-audio-user] Sound servers conflict

[Kai Vehmanen]

On Tue, 8 Feb 2005, Christoph Eckert wrote:

> You could use DMIX, an ALSA based sofmixer. But DMIX isn't 
> installed on much systems. I expect it to be more often found 
> in the future, but currently it isn't found on common users 
> machines.

Actually this is not quite correct. Dmix is part of standard ALSA and
is thus available on any recent Linux system. 

You are of course right that dmix is not commonly configured to be part of
default plugins. But most ALSA apps allow you to specify which soundcard
to use (the usual implicit choice is 'default'). If you specify
"plug:dmix", you'll get dmix output in most cases (unless user has
overridden the asoundrc configuration).

For example:
aplay -Dplug:dmix foo.wav
alsaplayer -o alsa -d plug:dmix 
ecasound -i foo.wav -o alsa,plug:dmix

This works on my system with vanilla alsa-lib-1.0.4 (quite old version in
fact) without absolutely no modifications to any ALSA configuration files
(I don't even have a ~/.asoundrc on this machine). So I assume this should
work out-of-the-box on any system that has recent ALSA (SuSE systems, FC2
and newer, Mandrake 10 and so on).

More info at:
http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php?page=DmixPlugin

PS I think dmix is _the_ solution for "desktop sound mixing". 
   Together with JACK they form a killer combo. :) I use JACK
   when making music (ability to route audio between apps, 
   transport control), and dmix when listening to mp3s (wide
   application support, no need to run nor configure any 
   servers; still great performance ... also latency-wise!).

-- 
 http://www.eca.cx
 Audio software for Linux!