[Pkg-alsa-devel] Bug#199226: Successful ALSA Dmix setup using asound.conf

[Matthew P. McGuire]

Hi Thomas,

I ran into the alsa dmix problem earlier and after some tinkering I came
up with the beginning of a solution.

I have the file /etc/asound.conf for the system wide settings and I have
modified /usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf to handle the dmix plugin a little
better. 

I found that using the default alsa.conf settings caused esd to not
load. Other ALSA apps would load fine. After some tinkering I discovered
some missing settings for the dmix plugin that fix esd. I am somewhat
cautious about those settings as I do not know how portable they will
be. 

I also found that the default @hooks section for .asoundrc and
asound.conf did not handle both files at once. It seems that if the
first file is not present the second is never loaded. I fixed this by
moving the files into separate @hooks sections. This appears to allow
the system to load each file safely. 

With this setup all ALSA users get dmix'ed audio out. The individual
users do not need an .asoundrc file but they can have one. I have not
setup mixing for all OSS emulation users yet. I found lots of dialog on
how this works and some docs on the ALSA OpenSrc Org[1] site but I
haven't completed the work. So far whenever I have an application using
the OSS emulation layer it locks the audio device.

Does this sound like an approach that will work? If not what kind of
complications are there so I can take them into account? What do you
think?

Thanks,

Matthew McGuire

[1] http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php?page=.asoundrc