On Sunday 15 November 2009 00:40:48 Dale wrote: > > The only reason arts ever existed at all was to do sound mixing in > > software in the days when hardware generally did not do that. > > > > These days alsa takes care of all of that. OSS-4 does a better job I > > hear, but in any case you do not need arts. If you did, how would it be > > possible to hear sound in a flash video in a browser on a non-KDE system? > > > > > > And I think that was my problem. It would only play one sound at a time > and some things hogged up the sound system. Mine makes a sound when I > change desktops for instance and it would hold onto the sound system for > a minute or so before other sounds could use it. >
Typical arts behaviour :-) arts would grab the sound device, and any KDE app could then use arts to play sound. arts used software mixing to make this all work. However, non-KDE apps (or any app actually without arts support) could not get to the sound device as arts had locked it. It would give up the lock after 1 minute of no sound. This led to obvious problems. There were some "solutions" such as a wrapper script you'd use to start gnome apps with, the wrapper would grab the gnome app sound and sent it onto arts. But none of this was synchronized so although the app sound played, you were never sure exactly *when* is would play .... Yuck. I mean, alsa is a bit of a mess but arts makes also look pristine and wonderful in comparison -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
