On Wed, Oct 31, 2007 at 10:47:20AM -0400, Nick Guenther wrote:
quoted text
> On 10/31/07, Samuel Proulx <traumator@gmail.com> wrote:
> > 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

Unix started like a typewriter. But then the multimedia came. And now try to
rebuild a typewriter into a VHS recorder. OK a magnetic tape instead of ink
tape, we keep the two spools, cut the platten to get the head drum, the keys
will be put on the remote control, but now what should we make the tape
loading mechanism from?

Can be seen that ambitious plans that seem to run fine at the beginning may
suddenly come to a screeching halt.

Apart from sound, the picture part is problematic on Unix too.  My X Window
system autorepeat suddenly starts to race with cosmic speed if something
prints with high speed in a different xterm (for example search in a lot
of small files in the Midnight Commander). Sometimes the X Window system
hangs with a screen filled with psychedelic colours upon startx and I have
to reboot the machine. Closing the lid sometimes switches the output to the
external LCD, sometimes not, and sometimes it produces shaking, noisy,
out of sync corrupted signal.

This is because instead of virtualizing the picture hardware in the kernel,
which is the idea of operating system, it's done by some dodgy third-party
application OpenBSD project has really no control over.

You may stop worrying about this stuff when you realize your video recorder
was rebuilt from a typewriter.

CL<

quoted text
> 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