Multiple sound instances

zalibidas · 01-24-2009, 01:21 PM

Like playing a youtube video and a song at the same time, for example. Friend of mine had it working like that on ubuntu. Would like to know how to do it on slackware.

Any idea how to do it? I searched for a while and couldn't find anything of that sort. I'm on 12.2, if you need to know.

Ilgar · 01-24-2009, 01:30 PM

You should configure the software to use Alsa (e.g. choose the Alsa output plugin your music player).

For XMMS, choosing the ALSA plugin wasn't enough for me. I have the following ~/.asoundrc file:

Code:

pcm.!default {
type plug
slave.pcm "swmixer"
}

pcm.swmixer {
type dmix
ipc_key 1234
slave {
pcm "hw:0,0"
period_time 0
period_size 1024
buffer_size 4096
rate 44100
}
}

Then I choose "swmixer" as the sound device in XMMS ALSA plugin configuration Window. That way, it doesn't block the Flash video sound for example.

For old software that don't support ALSA at all, you can use the "aoss" wrapper. Call the command as

Code:

aoss command

and it will use ALSA.

zalibidas · 01-24-2009, 01:36 PM

Well, found that a tad confusing.

New to linux. Only used it once at a friends house.

I can confirm that I'm using XMMS though. But I want a universal solution as opposed to just a specific player, if thats possible. If not, could ya explain it to me like I'm retarded or something.

Thanks for the help.

EDIT - Figured it out for the most part.

Ilgar · 01-24-2009, 01:56 PM

Hi Zalibidas,

This suggestion that software should be configured to use ALSA is generic, applies to all. It's just that for XMMS it wasn't enough, at least for me. Some cards have hardware mixing and for them, all this hassle is not required. I didn't have to make any special configuration for anything other than XMMS.

This sound architecture is one aspect of Linux which still need a bit of improvement. OSS was the old standard, ALSA is the new one, but there are still software using the OSS API, and in many cases you can configure them to use one or the other.