I did not measure if dmix really eats up CPU, but I'm more concerned with this problem: MPD, being a daemon is usually ordered to play some playlist or stream in the background. Now I suddenly want to, say, watch a youtube video. Now what? With the current setup my attempt will fail, I then need to recall why this happens, then I had to fire an MPD front-end and order MPD to stop, then re-start whatever I wanted to watch/hear (and what failed due to the busy sound subsystem) then get back to MPD front-end and continue listening. The problem is that this does really set MPD apart from the other sound-aware software as if it was special in some kind, but it's not! Conversely, it's very idea is to not get in the way.
Since crappy single-channel audio hardware is ubiquituous and I'm not aware of another A/V player packaged for Debian which behaved like MPD by monopolising the audio device, I urge you to rethink the default configuration. Also I wonder what happens to the users who enable sound notifications in their software (say, in IM clients, which is a quite common setup). May be it would be possible to make this setting tunable via debconf? Say, you could provide a template of mpd.conf with some sort of "tokens" (akin to those used by autoconf) which would be then expanded based on what settings the user selected using debconf? The relevant debconf setting could then be presented as an alteration between the "I have a single-channel audio card/I don't know" (the default) and "I have a multi-channel audio card". P.S. Also I don't quite get what is so bad about dmix? I stumbled upon this bug in MPD when I was forced to switch to laptop (from a normal desktop computer which had an SB Live! card with 32 HW channels), and so I had to tweak the configuration. I had Lenny on this laptop and now I have upgraded to Squeeze -- no single problem with dmix. MPD works OK, all other A/V software works OK and even the three games I happen to touch from time to time (Doom, Descent and Warzone 2100) work OK with it. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
