[geeks] Ubuntu sound question - esd w/alsa...

Charles Shannon Hendrix shannon at widomaker.com
Mon Sep 11 13:56:22 CDT 2006


Mon, 11 Sep 2006 @ 12:28 -0500, Mike Hebel said:

> Has anybody found a good way to get these to play together yet?  I'm using
> Dapper on a ThinkPad A31 and I'm getting the usual conflicts between alsa
> and esd.

What problems do you see?

What kind of sound hardware do you have?  Some sound hardware has no
multiplexing or hardware mixing support, and can't handle more than one
accessing program at a time.  If you have that kind of sound hardware (a
lot of motherboard sound is like that) then you need to make sure you
have ALSA compiled/configured to offer software mixing or only one
program will be able to use your sound devices at a time.

Sound cards like the Live! series have full hardware support for this so
the ALSA driver gets help with mixing and other issues like that.

If you can avoid even loading esd, you'll be better off in any case.

I don't have problems with esd myself, at least not outside of the fact
that esd sucks in general.

> I also can't seem to find the alsa configuration utility - has that
> been removed?

Are you talking about alsactl, alsamixer, etc?

On Slackware systems, they are in the alsa-utils package.


-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["People should have access to the data which
you have about them.  There should be a process for them to challenge any
inaccuracies." -- Arthur Miller]



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