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

[walt <w41ter@gmail.com>]

On 12/03/2009 09:08 PM, Joshua Murphy wrote:
...
> 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...

I discovered a few weeks ago that I could completely delete all traces
of arts, pulse, *and* esd, and still I can listen to a podcast from
npr.org with firefox and play an mp3 using audacious at the same time.
(Which drives me totally nuts, BTW, and I did it only as a test.)

As you say, alsa seems to DTRT by itself these days.  The only thing
I'm not sure about is whether the gnome-panel volume/mixer applet is
now doing what esound used to do.

If you still have esound installed you can try it yourself.  Just
remove the arts, esd, and pulse USE flags first, then remove any/all
of those packages from the machine and revdep-rebuild.  It's amazing
how many packages are linked against esound and AFAICT they no longer
need to be.  (This applies to gnome, of course.)

OTOH, I haven't tested every sound-related app on my machine, so I
might be missing some important exceptions.