[clue-tech] Battling for control over the sound

[marcus hall]

On Mon, Sep 07, 2009 at 10:12:19PM -0600, Todd A. Gibson wrote:
> I'm running Arch linux with alsa for sound.  If I run Firefox and
> bring up a music site or watch a Youtube video all is well.  If I
> bring up Pidgin, the sounds in that app work fine.  However if both
> are running then pidgin clobbers the sound from Firefox (perhaps
> because I start Pidgin after Firefox is running?)
> 
> Is this just the reality of running multiple applications
> simultaneously which use sound, or is there a solution to
> this dilemna?

This is the sort of problem that various sound daemons are supposed to
address.  Things like "esd" and now "pulse-audio".  They emulate the OSS
and/or ALSA interface, but pump it through a daemon instead that mixes
the audio from different applications and feed the mix to the real sound
hardware.

Sometimes, of course, the daemon causes problems of its own, though.

marcus hall