Linux sound system problems
 

Hi all,

After using Linux for quite sometime now, I find this inability to mix sound automatically (and properly) from several apps, a big pain in the a$$!

I'm running Mandrake 10.1 on a Thinkpad R40. It detects and uses the relevant ALSA driver for the soundcard without any problems. Since, I mostly use KDE, most of the apps are configured to use the arts daemon for output, and the sound gets mixed properly.

But, until now, I've been successful in doing this, only with KDE apps - amarok, kaffeine, etc which can be configured easily to use arts. But, the problem is with a lot of other non-KDE apps like mplayer, real player, instant messengers like AMSN, etc

These apps don't seem to have any option which can be changed to make them use the arts daemon in KDE and hence, the sound doesn't get mixed or even worse these apps refuse to start when some other app is using the audio device.

Isn't there a better way of doing this in Linux? How is it that in Windows sound gets mixed properly even while using some third-party app? Configuring every single app or building them from scratch to make them use a particular sound daemon for output doesn't sound very pleasant.

Thanks
/DesiLILO

You can use the dmix plugin. You shouldn't use arts anymore if you do. Still, there will be apps that are not alsa-aware and the sound will not mix. On my system most sounds mix, but it doesn't work with some games.

You'll need to make a ~/.asoundrc file and define the parameters as you can read here: http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php?page=DmixPlugin

Experiment some.