On 10/31/07, Samuel Proulx  wrote:

quoted text
> Hello,

>

> I have been using obsd as my primary desktop for a while now and i have a question about the sound system , is there a way to play

> two sounds at the same time ? Example watching youtube videos with opera and playing some music in the background with mpd or xmms .

> thank you for your time  ; )

Unix has always been kind of weak in this area. You need a mixer of

some sort to do this. Not /dev/mixer, which controls audio volumes for

the different hardware devices, but a software mixer.

You'll probably want http://ports.openbsd.nu/audio/esound. There's

something called Pulse which is intended as a drop in (but superior)

replacement for esound, and someone () ported it to OpenBSD, but it's

not in the tree yet.

Reading http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/PerfectSetup might be

enlightening; it describes how to configure each program you want to

use to use pulse.
Looking around some more, here's something like how you'd have to

configure mpd to use esound:

audio_output {

        type      "ao"

        driver    "esd"

        options   "host=jurp5-desktop:16001"

        name      "esd"

}
Yes, you need to have each program direct it's output to the mixer,

there's no way (as far as I know) to sneakily make /dev/audio be a

software mixer. I don't know if the reason there's no /dev/audio_mix

is technical, or if it's just that no one's done the work, or if it's

just a tradition now.
-Nick