On 1/16/06, Abhay Kedia <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Monday 16 January 2006 19:17, Michael Crute wrote: > > On the topic of sound servers. Being fairly ignorant about sound on > > linux (but willing to learn). Is there a good reason to use a sound > > server or am I better off to use ALSA directly? What purpose do sound > > servers serve? > > > If you check out mailing list archives of sometime back, you'll find me asking > exactly the same question. At that time I was using aRts with KDE, and was > experiencing nothing but problems. I did not get any concrete replies to this > particular question i.e. "Why use a sound server anyways?". Just to see how > things turn out, I disabled aRts and don't face any problems till now. I am > using ALSA directly.
The historical reason for sound servers was to allow multiple processes to generate sound simultaneously, and to have those sounds mixed together. For example, you wouldn't want to miss your new-mail notification while listening to music. But since ALSA now has the dmix plugin that works pretty well for those cards that do not provide hardware mixing, the only reason to continue to use a sound server is if you have trouble configuring dmix. The use of dmix is not automatic... -Richard -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
