On Wed, 2005-09-21 at 21:32 +0900, Dave Gutteridge wrote:
Save the following as ~/.asoundrc and kill all apps using sound:
Holy smoke, that worked like a charm! Worked so well in fact that I'm kind of stunned.
What the heck happened? What was that magical file? Why was it not there before and how was it so obvious that was the problem?
I'm keen to learn!
Some soundcards support hardware mixing, some don't. If the card doesn't then subsequent requests to open the audio device will be denied. The file provided activates the dmix ALSA plugin which does software mixing instead. dmix will always allow multiple apps to open the audio device since it does the mixing itself.
It's not there by default since software mixing does use some CPU power, and not all cards need it.