[ILUG] multiple sound cards... I retract

[Paul Jakma]

On Mon, 23 Apr 2001, Aaron McDaid wrote:

> I NEVER said otherwise. Period

ok, sorry..

> I just tried esddsp. Cool, it does the job I want.
> But I didn't think it was possible!

yes, i was going to suggest esddsp, but it seems hang the
via82cxxx_audio module on my machine.

> How the hell does it work? I ran 2 mpg123s and an xmms.
> My mpg123 is NOT esd aware, how does esddsp reroute it's
> request to /dev/dsp .

i uses LD_PRELOAD to hoik libesddsp into memory, which (i guess)
replaces the open() libc call with a version in libesd that checks
whether or not the app is trying to open /dev/*dsp.

if app tries to open /dev/dsp then i guess it does some trickery,
presumably returning an fd that is actually pointing to a socket to
the esd server instead of to /dev/dsp, so that when the app writes()
to the fd that it thinks is /dev/dsp it actually is writing to esd.

also, esddsp in combo with ESPEAKER should even make your old 'direct
to /dev/dsp' app network aware. cool...

> Good point there. Seeing as esddsp seems to solve backwards
> compatibility.

Some X terminals support NAS, Network Audio System. (particularly NCD
X-terms). And NAS is supported on many many Unixes, i remember a lot
of games way way back used NAS for audio. Now i'm trying to think why
the fsck the gnome people had to go and invent esd... did they not
know of NAS?

http://www.xfree86.org/~keithp/talks/media-slides/s-21.html

has a few slides that might sort of answer this question....

(and http://www.xfree86.org/~keithp/talks/ is very interesting)

Rethinking: Bundling sound into the X server itself wouldn't be a
good idea - very bad idea in fact, however it would be nice if X
would specify a network audio standard (new or existing)  so as to
try create a de facto standard.

All the efforts so far have for whatever reasons failed to become
true standards... which is a pain.

> Aaron - Thanks for putting up with me till I used esddsp.

got there in the end.

-- 
Paul Jakma	paul at clubi.ie	paul at jakma.org
PGP5 key: http://www.clubi.ie/jakma/publickey.txt
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