On Wed, Oct 31, 2007 at 09:17:05AM -0400, Samuel Proulx wrote:
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> 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

No there isn't. That's where the kernel fails in the virtualization of
hardware.

For example if I have music playing in the background, Audacity cannot open
the soundcard for recording. Can you imagine an operating system where if
Firefox was writing a webpage to the disk, your e-mail client couldn't read
a mail folder from the disk?

But Linux suffers from the same problem. Then there are some kind of
castle in the air solutions like esd or arts. I tried that on Linux. arts
segfaults periodically, esd plays the wrong pitch. It's like if you had
a special daemon running that would virtualize the harddisk for your browser
and e-mail client - a crap solution.

The proper natural solution is to implement this in the kernel where it belongs
to according to what they told us on the lectures - I have done a master degree
in operating systems, networks and compilers. They said that the kernel should
virtualize the hardware so each app thinks it's alone on the system. 

But that involves realtime resampling, Hann windows and finite impulse response
filters and that's work.  Especially for kernel people who are familiar with
locks and scheduling, but not with fourier transform and convolution.

CL<


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> in the background with mpd or xmms .  thank you for your time  ; )