ALSA sound: One output at a time :(

Erik Plaggenmar · 10-02-2004, 05:08 AM

Hi guys!
I have this weird problem.. I'm running kernel 2.6.8 with ALSA, i hava nforce sound card.... put, i have only one output at a time... like: i'm playing music in xmms, i don't hear sound of gaim....
I have this oss functions enabled in the kernel in the ALSA option tree

│ │ <*> OSS Mixer API │ │
│ │ <*i> OSS PCM (digital audio) API │ │
│ │[*] OSS Sequencer API

I don't know if its a kernel thingy.. maybejust some switch somewhere or an app..

Does anybody knows the cause of this??

Greetz,
Erik

320mb · 10-02-2004, 07:32 AM

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...der=descending

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...der=descending

psisquare · 10-02-2004, 07:41 AM

Hi Erik,

it's not a kernel thingy

You need to have a sound daemon running that will receive sounds from clients, mix them down and send them to your sound card.
You could use the Enlightened Sound Daemon (Debian packages esound and esound-clients). Xmms can be configure to send its output to esound; I can't help you with gaim, however.

Erik Plaggenmar · 10-03-2004, 04:47 AM

huhu okay, does anybody then maybe knows which piece of software i've installed that created this situation?

Thanks for the reply btw

-DC- · 10-09-2004, 04:12 AM

This is not caused by any software you installed. It is caused by Alsa not being able to do hardware mixing on certain soundcards (those without hardware mixers ;-)). The best way around this is to use a ~/.asoundrc to set up a dmix plug-in to allow transparent software mixing of multiple sources. Works fine for me on an Intel8x0 card (IBM T40 Thinkpad), which I believe is the sound chip the nForce uses. Check out the .asoundrc files here and here. Look at the bits about the dmix plug-in.

hth,

-DC-