(Forwarded, bounced due to spam protection) From: Forest Denger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: /dev/dsp and multiple clients Forgive me if this has been discussed before, but I cannot find any documentation on your website about it. I am currently using KDE 2.1 and have a Creative Labs SB Live! sound card. My concern is for the implementation of /dev/dsp on this particular card (there are actually 2 other very popular chipsets made by cirrus logic and aureal that have these same features). on my SB Live, I am able to allow many applications to write directly to /dev/dsp and it is mixed together in hardware. To my understanding, this dramatically offload's the cpu and does a big load of what aRts already does. I was wondering if there is any support for this in aRTs already, and if not, do you plan on adding support? I understand that most legacy sound cards do not support more than one audio stream, and that is the whole purpose of having a sound server, but in all modern day consumer level cards that are worth anything allow multiple audio streams to it directly, without a software layer. quoted from creative lab's website FAQ: "Features...Up to 32 simultaneous playback instances via multiple-open on /dev/dsp " I believe the cirrus logic chip allows up to 64 simultaneous instances implemented in hardware, and more may be added with future revisions of the chips/drivers (they are limited to the speed of the chip, the emu10k1 is currently the most powerfull consumer level chip, but the drivers are somewhat limiting in their younger state). I believe there are good alternatives to using aRts along with these cards, such as allowing an app writing to /dev/artsdsp direct access to /dev/dsp on cards that allow it. also, you could use aRts to manage the extra resources of these sound cards with some nifty stuff. I guess my main point is that aRts does a lot of stuff that is implemented in hardware on some cards, and I was wondering if aRts recognises these capabilities of this new hardware. Anyway, I dont wanna ramble on anymore, so please let me know what is going on in these areas. I may be wrong about how the whole thing works, so please tell me if I am. some interesting reading would be at the creative labs sblive driver development website which is at: http://opensource.creative.com ____________________________________ Forest Denger [EMAIL PROTECTED] University of Arkansas, Fayetteville ____________________________________ -- -* Stefan Westerfeld, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (PGP!), Hamburg/Germany KDE Developer, project infos at http://space.twc.de/~stefan/kde *-
