Re: [gentoo-amd64] Re: alsa mixer question

[Karol Krizka <kkrizka@gmail.com>]

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On Sunday 06 November 2005 07:30, Duncan wrote:
> Hemmann, Volker Armin posted
> <200511060449.41167.volker.armin.hemmann@tu-clausthal.de>, excerpted
>
> below,  on Sun, 06 Nov 2005 04:49:41 +0100:
> > On Saturday 05 November 2005 19:14, Dmitri Pogosyan wrote:
> >> As people said your choices are
> >>
> >> 1) Use sound card with hardware mixing
> >> 2) Run sound mixing daemon like esound or arts
> >> 3) Set up dmix in alsa.  I also heard that alsa 1.10 is supposed to
> >> come with replacement for dmix ?
> >
> > no, but since a recent version came out, you do not need to setup up
> > dmix. It should just work out of the box.
>
> Well... except with stuff that insists on using exclusive mode access.
> arts is one such "stuff", one of the big reasons folks have such
> difficulty with it.  Use it, and everything else has to play thru arts, or
> not play at all, when arts is active, even with hardware mixing or dmix.
>
I agree with you. Arts sucks and I can't wait when they get rid of it in 
KDE4 :) I once managed to get it to play nice with dmix, but then I switched 
to GNOME and now back in kde and can't get it working. I don't want to get 
rid of it since it's quite a lot of work getting all kde things working with 
alsa without arts and not worth the trouble. There is one useful aspect of 
arts that makes it not 100% bad, you can suspend it. When I go play a game 
that needs acess to /dev/dsp I just open the Arts Control Tool from the menu, 
click status and suspend it. Also it suspends automaticly every 60 seconds 
(configurable in kcontrol) or it might be possible to make a script for 
launching the game that suspends arts then launches. This is way less working 
than going opening cmd line, typing killall artsd then after game ends 
starting it again.

> At least, that's been my experience, and the arts kcontrol applet
> (kcmshell arts, or just find it in kcontrol) specifically mentions it DOES
> use exclusive mode, and that other things won't be able to use sound when
> it's active.
>
> Other sound daemons may or may not be equally "selfish".
>
> --
> Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
> "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
> and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman in
> http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html

-- 
Karol Krizka

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