alsa sound mixing aka dmix (not arts or esd needed)

Redeeman · l33t Joined: 25 Sep 2003 Posts: 957 Location: Denmark

@psygil:
i just didnt know of anything using higher.. cant really explain more

@mooktaking:
yes, you can use arts on top of dmix, just make aarts use alsa, and you will still be able to use regular non-arts programs when arts are running.

but. your thought was wrong, software didnt have to specific support this, just it uses oss or alsa, it will work
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MooktaKiNG · Guru Joined: 11 Nov 2002 Posts: 326 Location: London, UK

Imek · Posted: Wed Mar 17, 2004 8:57 pm Post subject:

This works for me, to a point.. I used Redeeman's original config and I can play two instances of XMMS at the same time, and I can also use aplay file.wav when XMMS is playing. However, what I want is to play ut2004 and NWN (both SDL apps if I'm not mistaken) but they just don't work like normal. ut2004 says /dev/dsp is busy if I run it without aoss, if I try with aoss it claims /dev/dsp doesn't exist. nwn just says nothing, I just get no sound. This is all with XMMS playing in the background.. And yes, I have the export SDL_AUDIODRIVER=alsa AUDIODEV=default in my .bashrc. Also, I want to run a Wine program (coincidentally, it uses SDL but there is no Linux port for it yet, I'm not sure how Wine works with SDL like this) and I get a segfault if I use aoss, and without aoss I get

err:wave:OSS_WaveOutInit OpenDevice failed (1)
wine: Unhandled exception, starting debugger...
etc

This is all quite frustrating. Any ideas?

Thanks.

PS my card is a bog standard onboard AC'97 dealie
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Redeeman · l33t Joined: 25 Sep 2003 Posts: 957 Location: Denmark

are you sure that you have oss emulation in the kernel?
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Niek · Posted: Thu Mar 18, 2004 6:56 am Post subject:

Redeeman · l33t Joined: 25 Sep 2003 Posts: 957 Location: Denmark

ut2k4 certainly uses SDL, however not for sound

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tecknojunky · Posted: Wed Mar 24, 2004 1:59 am Post subject:

Listening only to my guts, today i unmerged esound

. Regardless of this thread's title, esd is still needed for some apps to wack the speakers (unless I missed something). Other than that, dmix works. Sensible to cpu usage tough.

Anyone figured out how to have individual volume controls?

Added:

I take it back. I had to reinstall esound. Many apps where making use of libesd.so (name may be wrong). Further, now the sound is again jumpy. So I have two chained mixing layers, if I understand correctly.

Please. Give me a REAL desktop, one that works. It's not my ambition in life to figure out how a desktop works under the hood!

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gabor · Posted: Wed Mar 24, 2004 8:32 pm Post subject:

>I had to reinstall esound. Many apps where making use of libesd.so

you could try to reemerge those apps (and remove "esd" from your use-flags (or add "-esd" to your use flags)

tecknojunky · Posted: Wed Mar 24, 2004 8:46 pm Post subject:

gabor · Posted: Thu Mar 25, 2004 10:59 am Post subject:

i usually do this in the following way:

1. i identify the .so files in /usr/lib, which are linked to the given (already removed, like esd) .so files
2. i identify the packages, to which the .so files belong ( "epm -qf /usr/lib/libmy.so")
3. i reemerge them

step 1 can be done like this:
a. 'ldd', lists the dependencies for a given file ('ldd my.so')
b. i do it for all the files in /usr/lib
("for file in * ; do echo $file; ldd $file; done >~/log.txt") (i do this in /usr/lib
c. i go through log.txt and search for "not found"

tecknojunky · Posted: Thu Mar 25, 2004 5:48 pm Post subject:

Yeah, I thought it would have to be the hard way. Something like that should be taken cared of by Portage. In fact, this is what many of the Debian sect members at the University reproach to Gentoo.

I don't have time for this. I will finish the job in a couple of months. Thanks for the answer tough.
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charlieg · Posted: Fri Mar 26, 2004 1:00 am Post subject:

semiSfear · Guru Joined: 08 Jul 2003 Posts: 302 Location: Adelaide, SA

Well it works. But I am very dissapointed at alsa-xmms. I can play music thru xmms and watch at several movies at once and hear all sound sources, but xmms sound quality is bad. The sound in xmms get choppy, like you hear short "ticks" every half second. Tick tick tick chop tick tick chop chop ...

Really annoying, so far I'v solved it with using OSS in xmms and start xmms with "aoss xmms". Performance is good, can't say it's a bigger difference when I was using esd. Still it feels nice not to use a sound daemon which takes up CPU cycles and memory, no? :wink:

But if anyone got any good suggestons on improving the sound quality in xmms then please share with the public.

My specs:
gentoo-dev-sources 2.6.3-r1
media-libs/alsa-lib-0.9.8
media-libs/alsa-oss-0.9.8
media-sound/alsa-utils-0.9.8
media-plugins/alsa-xmms-0.9.12
~/.asoundrc:

synic · n00b Joined: 11 Jan 2003 Posts: 49 Location: SLC, Utah

Hi,

Here's my /etc/asound.conf:

bushwakko · Guru Joined: 25 Mar 2003 Posts: 495

It seems to me that all apps using alsa's pcm thingy works perfectly with dmix, however some apps use hw directly and then it doesn't work. :/

Could this be the problem, if so, could you make hw be a slave to dmix too or something?
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Redeeman · l33t Joined: 25 Sep 2003 Posts: 957 Location: Denmark

hmm, i dont think you can.. let me know if you find something interresting
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wizard69 · Apprentice Joined: 22 Sep 2003 Posts: 178 Location: Berlin

Here is my .asoundrc ( intel8x0)

image · n00b Joined: 03 Apr 2004 Posts: 17

semiSfear:

in xmms, you probably have to untick mtrr in alsa's configuration. that got rid of the noise for me.

iDarbert · Posted: Sun Apr 11, 2004 5:56 pm Post subject:

How about the Sound Blaster Extigy? This OSS emulation layer is driving me crazy!
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einstein1981 · Posted: Thu Apr 15, 2004 7:41 pm Post subject: Redeeman you are awsome!!

I actually copied and pasted it to my file in home folder and it works, nothing more to do!!

for informational purposes only for htose who read this post, it works on a dell inspiron 5150 laptop, with an intel 8xx sound card!

thanks a lot!
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Given M. Sur · Posted: Sat Apr 17, 2004 6:24 am Post subject:

Well, mplayer works fine for me, but I get no sound from mplayerplug-in. I tried adding "ao=alsa9:default" to /etc/mplayerplug-in.conf, but that didn't do anything.

Anybody know why mplayer would work but the plugin wouldn't?

By the way, I'm using mplayer 1.0_pre3_r5 and mplayerplug-in 2.50.

Everything else works fine though, so thanks everyone!

Edit: The problem is different than I thought. See my next post.

SOLVED -- See later post
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provicemo · Posted: Sat Apr 17, 2004 10:52 pm Post subject:

I just fixed a problem i had while trying to use mplayer alsa at the same time as anything else played via alsa. I changed:

Given M. Sur · Posted: Sun Apr 18, 2004 7:07 am Post subject:

I tried changing it to alsa9:dmixer in mplayerplug-in.conf and now I get sound, but the videos are playing about 3X to fast.

Edit: Hmm... it seems that my problem is with all streaming mplayer videos not just mplayerplug-in. I found a thread that might help me (https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=94052&highlight=mplayerplugin+fast), but I'm going to fiddle with some stuff and see if I can get it working without following that thread (since I didn't understand what that thread was saying to do exactly).

Another edit: I just checked and mplayer has no sound in streaming videos with alsa9:default, but is playing at the correct speed. So it's definately the alsa9:dmixer that's causing it to speed up (with sound).

Last edit: Well, using alsa9:dmixer definately doesn't work for me. MPlayer plays local files about 15% too fast, and streaming files about 300% too fast with that setting. I tried using RealTimeClock support as suggested in the other thread, but it did not help at all. So, I unenabled rtc, and switched back to alsa9:default.

Well, I just realized that with alsa9:default I do not get sound from movies that are 48kHz when I have "rate 44100" in ~/.asoundrc, and I do not get sound from movies that are 44.1kHz when I have "rate 48000". So, perhaps the streaming files that I have been testing have been at different rates than either of those.

Is there any way to make the rate variable? Or is there anything I can do to convert it at playback?

SOLVED -- see later post
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Given M. Sur · Posted: Sun Apr 18, 2004 9:49 am Post subject:

Okay, I figured out the problem with putting "alsa9:dmixer" in mplayer.conf.

It will play the file at whatever speed you have in ~/.asoundrc. So, if you have the rate set to 48000 and try to play a file that has audio in 41.4kHz it will be too fast. Likewise if your rate is set to 44100 and try to play a file that has audio at 48kHz it will be too slow. (Unfortunately, I have (almost)perfect pitch, so I will always notice if the pitch is too high or too low, and it will bug me a lot)

So, apparently I've been testing streaming files that are in a very low rate, which is why they were playing about 3X too fast.

So, at the moment I'm limited to using just mplayer and changing my ~/.asoundrc anytime I need to play a file with a different frequency. I will not be able to use mplayerplug-in though, because there is no way to know what frequency the files are playing at then.

Which brings me back to the questions: Is there any way to make the rate variable in ~/.asoundrc? Or is there any way to make mplayer convert the sample rate at playback?

SOLVED -- see next post
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Given M. Sur · Posted: Tue Apr 20, 2004 12:14 am Post subject:

Well, due to my problems with mplayer (see above) I figured I would try to use mplayer with ao=oss, and then use "aoss mplayer" to play files.

This allows me to play files that are in different frequencies with mplayer, but unfortunately, aoss will not allow me to play more than one sound at once, which makes it completely useless (since if I only wanted one sound at once I wouldn't have ever tried setting up dmix).

Does anybody know how I can get aoss to play more than one sound at once?

EDIT - PROBLEM SOLVED:
In mplayer it is possible to convert audio sample rates using the -srate flag. Or you can edit your mplayer config file (/etc/mplayer.conf, or ~/.mplayer/config) and add the line srate=X (X being the rate defined in .asoundrc).

:oops:

I can't believe that the mplayer man page was the last thing I checked (after a whole lot of hassle trying to configure .asoundrc)
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