well, it can probably do what I want, just not as default..

installed ALSA, got it working on a gentoo 1.4 system...

but i can only play one sound source at a time.. any ideas? I'd like to listen to XMMS while watching movies w/sound

Listen to music and a movie?
heheh

Well, sound drivers can't manage many sounds at once, that's what a sound-server is for. KDE by default uses aRTs soundserver (analog Real-Time synthesizer). Gnome uses esound, which does basically the same thing. These daemons mix down audio output from one or more sources and enable simultaneous usage of your soundcard.

Try them out.

-Shade

I was told that ALSA is a better, faster alternative to these deamons?

I've used both in the past and they are terribly slow (to respond).

I have a sound blaster card and with just the alsa driver loaded I can have xmms and xine running at the same time (both use the OSS -compatabile output plugin don't know if that makes a difference though).

jpbarto

was this by default? or did you have to modify something?

I installed ALSA from source (I have an LFS system) and I think I had to tell XMMS (in its output plugins) to use OSS ... same with Xine.

alsa is a set of soundcard drivers/libs/tools and does not have the same functionality as arts or esound. the reason jpbarto can play more than one thing at once is because his soundcard supports more than 1 output channel, if he runs multiple versions of mpg123 or xmms then he will soon max out his sound card output channels. and will find he cant play anymore things.

ive never used arts but i dont have any problems with esound.

well there you have it. all the magic is gone now... sound channels huh? never did do much research into sound cards / how they work / etc.

kev82, just out of curiosity do you know off-hand how many sound channels the audigy supports? how many sound channels do sound cards usually support (like the ones commonly found integrated into motherboards?).

learn something new every day.

thanks,
jpbarto

i dont know a great deal about sound but ive just had a look through /proc and i get the impression that for each playback channel on card n there is a directory /proc/asound/cardn/pcmmp where m ranges from 0 to num channels - 1. the same is true for capture channels but they are pcmmc

ive searched for documentation on the alsa proc interface but have been unable to find any.

just for my interest would you mind confiming this for me. if you can play more than one thing at once you should have more than one /proc/asound/card0/pcm?p/ directory

I'll have to take a look in proc when I get home thanks again.

bkeating how are you faring? what type of card are you using? can you go my route just using the drivers or are you going to give something like esound a try?

I have EsounD (esd) installed and running.. i even directed XMMS to play through it but it's laggy... the stop/stop/seek response is slower then ALSA/OSS and it makes the eq in xmms delated. Is this how it's supose to run or can I modify this?