The only thing I hate in Linux which would make it the best-

[thamarok]

..which is that I can't have multiple applications running which use audio output... For example: I like to have my music playing in XMMS while playing Dragon Ball Z: Buu's Fury on VisualBoyAdvance (btw, I need a little help with the game.. I'm in chapter 6, but don't know where Kami's Lookout is..)..

But that is not possible!
In Window$ XP, I can play Megaman X8 at the same time as my music is playing in Winamp..

[DeanLinkous]

one of those is pigging the sound device...

have you tried a different music player?

KDE or Gnome?

[bigdufstuff]

This is why sound deamons exist. Your hardware does not support hardware mixing, so it can only handle one audio signal at a time. The solution is to mix the audio signals in software before sending them to the sound card. esd is the sound deamon used in GNOME and artsd is the one in KDE.

[brain]

There is builtin software mixing in ALSA. You don't even need strange dmix-configuration files. This is supported in some of the latest kernels in the 2.6 series (running 2.6.18 myself). Finally Linux has a sound sub system capable of software mixing without using sound servers in user space.

[thamarok]

There is builtin software mixing in ALSA. You don't even need strange dmix-configuration files. This is supported in some of the latest kernels in the 2.6 series (running 2.6.18 myself). Finally Linux has a sound sub system capable of software mixing without using sound servers in user space.

I have the 2.6.18 kernel and ALSA installed too, but there is definately no software mixing done.. I have KDE and artsd is installed, but how can I configure programs to use it? For example, Cedega allows only configuration for ALSA and OSS... so how can I workaround that to be run through artsd??

Thanks!

[Grifter]

I thought you had an sblive? Well get an sblive and you'll get multiple audio streams

(note, as you compare this to win, this was only standardized in windows around 98, 99, when everything started to be piped to directsound, which handled all the mixing, previously it had been a little sporadic, it was possible but some programs didn't come set with it automatically - for example winamp - so you had to change the output to use directsound if you wanted winamp playing music when you played starcraft for example (: )

anyway, I always used sb cards so I never encountered the problem myself, it was actually quite a revelation that in this day and age you still can't get audio stream mixing in the hardware with some cards, but the sblives always had it, even back when ALSA didn't exist and all you had was OSS drivers

[thamarok]

Damn! So I should take out some money of my pocket and get a new card?

OK

EDIT: Btw, can't JACK do this for me?

[mzilikazi]

EDIT: Btw, can't JACK do this for me?

jackd is a sound daemon but not all apps know jack. So....... while apps like XMMS, Audacious, Ardour, Mplayer are great for use with jack others are not e.g. ANYTHING that uses gstreamer as a backend like Amarok because gstreamer-jack plugin is not maintained anymore (unless someting has changed very recently) and lots (most?) games are not jack aware.

[Grifter]

just don't get one of the new 24bit cards tham

[thamarok]

just don't get one of the new 24bit cards tham

Ok, but which non-24bit card with hardware mixing is cheap? Right now after buying lots of things I'm getting on a small budget until it's payday and I get loads of bucks....

[Grifter]

any sblive or audigy prior to the 24bit versions of those cards

if you have secondhand computer stores near you, i'm sure you can pick one up for not more than 5 bucks

otherwise check out ebay