full duplex sound card means that you can have pcm sound go in and out at the same time. Allows you to do things to record what is being played on your sound card to a file and stuff like that.. I think. I am not completely sure.
But what is required is generally called hardware mixing. Probably some santa cruz sound cards support it, but I don't know which do, or which one your using, or how good of driver support you have for them. Could be that they are just not that well supported in linux.
In Windows XP everything you play goes thru a software mixer called Kmixer. You may of heard of AISO drivers that are used optionally on nicer sound cards. Those AISO bypass the kmixer because the kmixer adds sound latency. So you wouldn't realy be able to tell just by using it in Windows XP wheither or not it supports hardware mixing.
Now if your device doesn't support hardware mixing, or linux drivers don't support it at least, there are a couple things you can do.
One is called dmix. In Linux the newer sound drivers, called alsa, support a framework of plugins and such (it allows some cool things like being able to route sounds to specific speaker outputs and such). Dmix is a plugin that allows software mixing, so that you can have multiple sounds inputs being mixed before it gets sent to your sound card.
The downside is that apps you use must support and often need to be configured to use alsa specificly, or they won't mix and will seize your sound card.
Another option is to use a sound daemon (a system background proccess) that sound apps go into and send their sound to. It mixes it itself and then sends it to the sound card drivers.
There are 2 I am familar with; esd and artsd. Esd is for Gnome, and it sucks and nobody wants to use it, and the other is Artsd, which is fairly nice.
The downside is that you have to use KDE apps that supports using Artsd, plus then artsd controls the sound card and will make other sound apps not work that don't work thru it.
This can be fixed mostly by using a combination of dmix and artsd. Since artsd is alsa-compatable it can use the dmix plugin itself.
But then you have the very rare app that doesnt' support any of this. (such as quake3 and quake3-based games).
Luckly you have artsdsp wrapper that can grab the sound from apps and force it thru artsd.
So you would have most of your sound issues covered. Use dmix, use artsd and configure it (using the kcontrol program) program to go thru alsa
mix, and then use artsdsp wrapper for apps that refuse to get along with anything.
And this leads to the second issue you've been having... Slow nautilus.
Nautilus tends to be slow for a lot of people..
One of the things it does that may be screwing you up is that it creates a icon cache for multimedia files. Like for movies it will play the first 10-15 seconds of it and grab a frame and use it as a icon. Similar things for images, too.
Usually it this icon thing is disabled for remote file systems (like network file shares and such), but it may be configured for usb devices.. I don't know.
One way to fix this this by not using Gnome at all. Use KDE with it's konquerer file manager, which is faster.
Plus you can use all KDE apps for your multimedia stuff and thus get the benifit of artsd with minimal of effort.
It's up to you. There may also be a issue with Fedora's Nautilus that I am not aware of.. you can get more fedora-specific help from their forums and help irc lines that way.
Also if you can get a soundblaster or audigy card, those are generally well supported and have hardware mixers that work correctly by default. Don't get a 'Audigy LS' though.. those are different from other audigy/sound blaster card. Just a cheapo Audigy 1 or Audigy 2 are very nice cards for Linux.
Facebook
Twitter