[wplug] SOUND!

[Bryon Gill]

ALSA on 2.6 has 'just worked' on every sound card I've tried to use in the last 
year or so, using Fedora Core 1 and 2.  I even have a professional M-Audio card 
hooked into one of my PC's and it runs beautifully.

The ESD thing is tricky- ESD is a broker for your /dev/dsp and tries to 
intercept stuff, but some times latency is really bad or programs think the 
device is occupied.  For games you sometimes have to turn it off- otherwise it 
should be transparent to most of your sound applications; ditto for artsd in KDE 
apps.

I have only one real gripe, and it's not Linux's fault- mp3 can't work out of 
the box for a truly free distribution because of patent concerns with 
Fraunhofer.

Bryon

On Sat, 18 Sep 2004, Brandon Kuczenski wrote:

> A recurring theme at the installfest today was that NOBODY COULD GET THEIR
> SOUND TO WORK!  In fact, 75% of those surveyed had sound problems.  Mine
> are intolerable (for those of you helping me at the installfest -- no, the
> DVD player still does not work) and I would like to fix them.
>
> The problem is, the documentation on TLDP is out of date -- it emphasizes
> configuring ISA devices -- and other documentation is at best "limited in
> scope."  In particular, the application I'm curious about - the
> "enlightened sound daemon" - seems to have scarcely any docs at all!
> e.g.:
> http://www.fifi.org/doc/esound-common/html/introduction.html
> My impression is that this program is supposed to sit on /dev/dsp and
> accept connections from programs that want to play sound.  The problem,
> there's no documentation telling how to get EsounD and these various
> 'client' programs to hook up, and when i try to, for example, play a DVD,
> it says that the device is in use and can't play sound.  Everything is
> just a big broken-fest, undocumented and nonfunctional.  It's very
> disillusioning and my dreams of someday replacing my windows machine with
> some magical distribution that works are fading away.  Let's face it --
> playing sound is a pretty fundamental feature of modern PCs.
>
> Barring any further information from the local list, can anyone suggest
> who I should email next?  ESounD doesn't seem to have a support list, alsa
> is just the 'driver' portion, and debian or gnome just seem too distant
> from my project.  But I must admit, I'm going to probably have to take
> this to the Debian list because I am out of steam.
>
> -Brandon
>
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