Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Sound card is only usable by one application at a time

[Joshua Murphy <poisonbl@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 8:12 PM, walt <w41ter@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/03/2009 01:23 PM, Yoav Luft wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>> On my dell Vostro 1520, with intel hda ICH9 82801I sound card
>> (xSTAC92HD71B3, according to /proc/asound/card0/codec), only one
>> application can access the sound card at a time...
>
> I hope Nikos's suggestion will help you, but just in case it doesn't:
>
> Most people don't have any need for more than one application to use
> the sound card at the same time.  Do you have a special purpose in
> mind, such as mixing multiple sound tracks, professional-quality
> sound editing, film editing with special sound effects, or something
> similar?
>
> If you do, then you will be one of the very few people who actually
> needs to use pulseaudio, because it will allow multiple applications
> to use one sound card at the same time.  That is the purpose of
> pulseaudio.  But, as I said, very few people really need it.
>
> Can you explain more about what you are trying to do?

I'm not the OP, but it's been my experience that, when things aren't
configured to handle multiple processes using audio, you can't even
pause a movie in, say, mplayer to check out the youtube video a friend
just pointed you towards... which nowadays, is far from an uncommon
thing for a person to expect their computer to handle.

Lately, I've had zero issues with alsa pretty much configuring itself
properly, given I'm using the in kernel alsa drivers for my systems...
and it hasn't required any manual configuration of dmix or similar to
function properly. Last time I used a separate sound daemon (aside
from a short stent with Ubuntu on my netbook that, I think, had me
using pulseaudio), I was running esound to manage audio from a
headless box over my network... and ESD was playing nicely with other
straight alsa apps on the same box.

As a bit of a tip to the OP, since I'm going on about it all working,
while for them it isn't... 1) make sure you're using the alsa drivers
for your card and not oss (checking lspci -k) and 2) enable oss
emulation in the kernel (makes even OLD oss based software work
without much argument, in my experience).

-- 
Poison [BLX]
Joshua M. Murphy