Do I need arts/esd and alsa?

zajelo3 · 08-28-2004, 05:39 PM

Do I need to have arts/esd installed on my box since I use alsa for sound. Or do they each serve a seperate purpose?

slyman · 08-29-2004, 07:25 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by zajelo3
Do I need to have arts/esd installed on my box since I use alsa for sound. Or do they each serve a seperate purpose?

Alsa only allows one thing to have access to sound at a time.

E.g. if you are listening to MP3s via xmms using alsa, you won't get sound alerts from Gaim if a friend logs in.

esd and arts address this. They hog alsa, but allow multiple applications to talk to them.

I use esd for everything (Gaim, Zinf etc) except mplayer, because a) the sync is cr@p with esd and 2) I don't want to be disturbed by Gaim while watching a movie.

So... No you do not need it, but do you want to have esd/arts installed?

zajelo3 · 08-29-2004, 07:58 PM

That's what I thought, as far as arts and esd basically doing software mixing for the sound card. Alsa has something similar called the dmix plugin. I need to read up on it because I run into the sound mixing problem when I play ut2004 and want to listen to a CD at the same time (I can't). Thanks for the clarification.

megaspaz · 08-29-2004, 09:18 PM

for just about any SDL app, you can preppend the artsdsp to the application command. so for UT2K3, for me in kde using the arts sound system running on kde start up, i use this to run UT2K3:

Quote:

artsdsp /usr/local/games/ut2003_demo/ut2003_demo

this will allow you to run ut and something like xmms at the same time. there is a small sync delay in ut though. i don't use esd, so i don't know what you would use for that to force an app to pipe sound to the sound server for mixing, but it could be well worth it to play around with different sound servers.