Enable Playback of Multiple sounds / streams / apps at once

[telemetric_au]

ok this was surprisingly simple , and im glad i looked into it, as it was annoying not to hear skype calls or IM sounds when watching a movie or otherwise already using the sound device.

firstly for details sake im running an old cheap on-board acer 230 laptop sound card;

#aplay -L

default:CARD=I82801DBICH4
Intel 82801DB-ICH4, Intel 82801DB-ICH4
Default Audio Device

basically cheap cards like this and ac97's don't support hardware mixing of streams and need software to do it for them.

following this guide here, I searched out the sources for and installed

alsa-oss, alsaplayer, and mpg321

(alsaplayer-alsa and alsa-base are also mentioned but i skipped them as they appear ok with puppy alpha 5)

*
you may not even need to install any of these you may be able to just setup the config below, as the apps are merely for testing, though maybe not alsa-oss, it may even come with puppy ?? im not fussed i enjoy installing sources now i have the devfs hooked up.
*


so the short of it is i created a .asoundrc file in /root/ with the following contents:

Code: Select all

pcm.dsp0 {
    type plug
    slave.pcm "dmix"
}
# mixer0 can stay unchanged, because
# it isn't used anyway, I guess ;)
ctl.mixer0 {
    type hw
    card 0
}

and now everything plays at once

(if it doesn't work for you see the guide as there are other setup options)

though i had to install newer pet of VLC.