ALSA quick: update

[Haden]

After examining some sources (zinf) I made patch for xmms alsa plugin, enable "soft volume" option and you'll get expected behavior.
(pathed plugin is here if anyone is interested)

 

[Spyro]

I'm not too sure that I know exactly what you are talking about, but alsa does have a mixer and arts, esd, etc. work fine with it. You see, alsa is compatible with OSS drivers (if you have it configured right), so all programs that use sound will be able to work just fine: mixers, games, media players...

 

[Haden]

I'm talking about application being able to set volume level for itself. If for example I have 3 sound apps playing sounds, I want to be able
to set one to be louder that others etc. Currently if you try to lower first apps volume it either alters Main or pcm, changing volume for all apps.
I know OSS doesn't support this for sure, but I wonder about ALSA (windows from 2k support this, doesn't matter if app uses dsound or wavemapper,
BeOS even has separate control pad where you can alter volumes of all sound apps running...).

 

[drag]

Well I did some experimenting and the answer is:

Depends how smart the applications are. I tried xmms running straight from alsa, over the wrappers: artsdsp and esddsp.

Xmms insisted on doing it from the hardware mixer.

However I then used alsaplayer to play music and I could have mutliple instances of that open and I could control each instance's sound volume independantly.

So Linux CAN, but since alsa is new, or something, and we are comming out of the OSS (open source sound) dark ages were only one thing could be run at a time, most apps just use the hardware mixers.

This will change in time, of course, especially after 2.6 is mainstreamed, since this uses arts Edit: (crap I ment ALSA not arts) be default. (although it will still support OSS stuff)

You could probably use artsd to do it too, but you'd be restricted to only using kde-based sound apps. Which in itself is all that bad.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Psh, don't expect the xmms people to fix it soon, they even refuse to move to gtk2 :Q

edit, heh, someone is doing it on their own, cool. http://www.gnomedesktop.org/article.php?sid=1406

 

[Haden]

Thanks,
haven't thought about trying alsaplayer out. I imagine it would be easy to take a peak info alsaplayer source and make patch for xmms.

 

[Haden]

^