Newsgroups:  gmane.linux.debian.user
Date:        Mon, 25 Oct 2004 13:59:05 -0700

>>>I think you are confusing the two. Alsa is a sound architecture but
>>>esound is a sound daemon. Alsa makes sounds where as esound plays more
>>>of a traffic cop role. Bottom line is that they serve two different
>>>purposes when dealing with sound. Alsa plays the driver or module role.
>>>Someday it might be able to do the job of a sound daemon as well but I
>>>don't think this is the intent of the project.
>>
>>I thought the never ALSA could play the role of 'traffic cop'?  As in,
>>it can get input from different streams and then merge them before
>>sending it to the soundcard.
>>
>>Or does sound daemons do more?
>
> Alsa cannot play multiple audio streams simultaneously. From what I
> understand, this is  more of a hardware limitation than an alsa
> limitation. They claim that some sound cards can do automatic hardware
> mixing. If your card can't do this then there is a plugin called "dmix"
> that does software mixing (i.e. allow sounds to play simultaneously) .
> I've never tried it. Just search "alsa dmix" for plenty of how-to's. I
> would imagine just using esd or arts would be easier and work flawlessly
> at the moment. I think a lot of Gnome apps are probably programmed to
> use esound. Give it a try... it can't hurt.
>
> I'm no sound expert by any means so take this with a grain of salt...

there's dmix plugin in alsa (for software mixing), see:

http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php?page=DmixPlugin

Erik Steffl