Re: [Alsa-user] problems with dmix, a52 and upmix

[James S. <Sha...@ea...>]

> 0. without dmix I cannot share the sound card which is a big problem!

There are plenty of ways to share sound without dmix.  artsd, jackd, esd, aoss, and probably others.  As long as the apps in question use alsa natively you don't even need to have those to have shared sound.  At least not since 1.0-ish versions of alsa.

On my older and slower laptop having a dmix configuration caused it to have poor audio latency with the symptoms you've described.  Not that I've done anything with spdif, or surround sound type setups.  But getting rid of ~/.asoundrc completely got rid of that issue for me.  Starting oss based apps with aoss also helps.  $ aoss firefox.  Not that the children processes (popups) get started with aoss.

HTH