xmms + q3 or skype?

mikkoloo · Posted: Thu Jun 30, 2005 8:17 pm Post subject: xmms + q3 or skype?

I was just wondering what is needed to for example play sound in xmms and at the same time having sound in skype? Or xmms with games, whatever. I remember having this on my old emu10k1 soundcard. My current soundcard is a nforce3 intel thing using the intel8x0 module.

0000:00:06.0 Multimedia audio controller: nVidia Corporation nForce3 Audio (rev a2)

tlailax · Apprentice Joined: 22 Feb 2004 Posts: 187

either a hardware mixing capable sound card (emu10k1) or a sound server like arts, or esd. for the latter to work every application you use needs to be able to talk to the arts server.

mikkoloo · Posted: Fri Jul 01, 2005 12:11 pm Post subject:

well yea i have arts in kde, but i cant seem to have 2 sound sources at the same time. do i have to configure it further for it to work?

russianpirate · Posted: Fri Jul 01, 2005 3:38 pm Post subject:

maybe all of those programs dont support arts so they use oss/alsa taking over the device

mikkoloo · Posted: Fri Jul 01, 2005 4:10 pm Post subject:

very possible. but this hardware mixing, is that handled by the driver alone?
i dont wanna drag up windows all the time but there it works with more sound sources.

neonknight · Posted: Fri Jul 01, 2005 4:43 pm Post subject:

arts has a wrapper to start applications which do not support arts natively. I guess it's call artswrapper or so (I'm a hardcore gnome-user

).

Hardware-mixing is done by the hardware (guess where its name comes from

), so changing the driver will have no effect at all. You will need another soundcard. emu10k1 is the driver for soundblaster-cards. My "soundblaster live" supports this hardware-mixing, so I can listen to several audio-sources without configuring any software-mixer.

KrissN · Posted: Fri Jul 01, 2005 5:38 pm Post subject:

You could try to tell XMMS to redirect sound to the second DAC of your sound card (every full-duplex ones should have two of them). If you're using the ALSA output plugin, just go to the configuration dialog and change the device from default to "??? (hw:0,1)" (??? would stand for the name of your sound card).
This way you'll leave the primary DAC to be used by any other app.

igoldtho · n00b Joined: 20 Apr 2003 Posts: 22

I wonder if esound can somehow be used? I can play an mp3 using 'mpg321 -o esd -a localhost <trackname>' while xmms is already playing a different track (using the esound output plugin). Trouble is, Skype only seems to know how to output to /dev/dsp*. As for as I can see as soon as a process is using /dev/dsp* another process that tries will get an error. If skype could be tricked somehow into using esd instead...

(if you don't have esound)

mikkoloo · Posted: Sat Jul 02, 2005 11:14 pm Post subject:

but if its hardware related, how come windows can handle it for example? well yea its a complete other os. but if another os can handle it it cant really be all up to the hardware, right?

tlailax · Apprentice Joined: 22 Feb 2004 Posts: 187

maybe this will help with skype ?

http://www.skype.com/help/guides/soundsetup_linux.html

and as for windows, maybe the driver there (or the os) does some mixing in software transparantly. maybe there is a "sound server", they just don't mention it because the user wouldn't care to know.