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Thread: ubuntu sound on one thing at a time wtf?

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    Yer Da Sells Avon! keef247's Avatar
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    ubuntu sound on one thing at a time wtf?

    right linux is abit crackly on xmms sometimes on some formats.and i cant hear sound from more than one thing at a time.for instance i wont here IM sounds on amsn whilst playing music in xmms... so how do i sort this because otherwise its pathetic to only allow one sound a time!
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    the short answer: make sure all of your applications are configured to use "ALSA" or "ESD" sound output






    the long answer: linux originally had a sound driver system called "OSS". OSS is very simple, in that it creates a device node that things can interact with (imagine having a C:\soundcard folder you can copy WAV files into to make them play). as part of its simplicity, OSS only allowed as many sounds to play at once as there are hardware buffers on the card. for almost all cards on the market, that's 1 (on windows these cards would emulate buffers in software). the exception is the creative labs emu10k1 chip (live, audigy1-4).

    to get around the limitation, sound servers were born - an application would send sounds to a sound server, and the sound server would mix the audio together, and use the single buffer to give the impression of multiple sounds at once. ESound and aRts are the main examples. sound servers suffer from two problems: 1) they block your sound card, so apps that don't work with sound servers stop working 2) they're designed for pure audio use, where you don't notice minute timing issues. for audio/video, the lag is noticeable.

    nowadays, the solution is different. a new driver structure called ALSA replaced OSS, and it does all the mixing stuff by itself, in the background. that means any app using ALSA will just work with other apps using ALSA. OSS drivers are being removed from the kernel entirely, and apps are expected to move to the new system.

    ubuntu uses ALSA by default, but also runs the old ESound daemon on top - this means any app which works with ESound or ALSA will cooperate with other apps that use one of those two, on any hardware. the only problem is apps which use OSS - these will simply lock out the sound card on non-audigy cards.

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