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

[Nikos Chantziaras <realnc@arcor.de>]

You didn't mention whether you tried running the alsasound service in 
order to get dmix.  If enabled, it doesn't matter what sound device the 
apps want to open.

On 12/05/2009 05:51 PM, Yoav Luft wrote:
> hmmm. I've managed to focus the problem: Some programs try to access
> to sound device called "hw:0,0" and there for do not allow it to be
> shared. MPD was one of them, and when I changed the setting in
> mpd.conf to using "default" it works. The flash player, though, still
> tries to access the hardware directly. I'm not sure how to reconfigure
> it. I'm using the adobe player.
> Can anyone think of away of making all programs use "default" sound
> output rather than "hw:0,0"?
> Should I report that as a bug to the mpd package maintainer, that the
> default setting try to access the sound device directly?
>
> On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 6:12 AM, Joshua Murphy<poisonbl@gmail.com>  wrote:
>> On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 4:43 PM, walt<w41ter@gmail.com>  wrote:
>>> 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.
>>
>> All Gnome's volume/mixer applet does, AFAIK, is the same as alsamixer,
>> on a less cli/ncurses interface... just volume control for the
>> channels the card tells the driver to tell the alsa subsystem it has
>> ;) ... it doesn't have anything more, really, to do with the actual
>> 'mixing' than that, and it works just as well without it, as evidenced
>> by my netbook with ratpoison, no arts, esd, pulseaudio, etc...
>> listening to a radio stream on one aterm that's running mplayer
>> (outputting to bare alsa) and getting prompt and proper alerts from
>> Skype at the same time.
>>
>> 'Course, all the anecdotal evidence in the world won't make the
>> problem the OP is seeing.
>>
>> --
>> Poison [BLX]
>> Joshua M. Murphy
>>
>>
>
>