Bugzilla – Bug 117806
Setup ALSA dmix plugin if card has no hardware mixing
Last modified: 2006-10-24 08:18:16 UTC
Sometimes I want to use old OSS applications beside KDE. This is no problem with the OSS emulation, but my souncard has no hardware mixer and thus I can only hear sound from the OSS app, not from other ALSA ones. I read about a "dmix" plugin which provides a software replacement for the hardware mixer. Since especially games tend to still use OSS, I suggest that the soundcard configuration in YaST sets up this module automatically if teh card has no hardware mixer.
Takashi, what do you think about this feature?
If you aren´t sure whether this is important or not, just have a look at ther forums on www.transgaming.org. Many people want to use TeamSpeak (OSS only) with their games, and have to buy a soundcard with hardware mixing because they don´t know how to setup dmix correctly. This could really be done by the distro :)
Any reason this is still "needinfo"? This applies IMHO to 10.1 as well. Do you need more information?
Hello, please enable dsnoop plugin by default as well. It is useful even if 3rd party app supports ALSA, e.g. softphone.
The dmix plugin is already used by default for most of onboard and PCI soundcards. The problem is that OSS applications need to use aoss wrapper to use ALSA plugins (e.g. dmix), use 'aoss <application>' command to start the application. A note about aoss has been added into the help text in the yast module (yast2-sound-2.13.16).
Suppose I install an OSS application using YaST. Will it be installed using 'aoss <application>'? Like it is done for 3D graphics using CheckHardware --3D <application> Anyway my current hardware does not have this problem, or is it fixed in the oss emulator?
(In reply to comment #7) > Suppose I install an OSS application using YaST. > Will it be installed using 'aoss <application>'? It depends on the application, but in my opinion probably not. > Like it is done for 3D graphics using > CheckHardware --3D <application> > > Anyway my current hardware does not have this problem, > or is it fixed in the oss emulator? It also depends on the sound card, some sound cards (e.g. SB Live, SB Audigy...) have hardware mixing. They support multiple input streams so a sound server or dmix plugin is not needed.