Duelling sound cards (was: Re: [plug] Dual sound cards)

[Cameron Patrick]

Kai wrote:

| I'm trying to get XMMS to work with my SB Live! instead of using the 
| crapping on-board sound card on my mobo, I've looked in all the places I 
| think are logical and I can't find anything in KDE's GUI that says for 
| the sound to be sent through the SB Live instead of the poxy on-board card.

In XMMS, I can go to Preferences, Output plugin, Configure, and see a
drop-down list of sounds cards.  That's using the crossfade plugin
(which you should be using anyway because it's better that the stock OSS
one :-P).  I'm not sure if the standard OSS plugin supports this.  I'd
be surprised if the ALSA one didn't.

KDE Control Centre has a "Use custom sound device" check box under Sound
& Multimedia -> Sound System, which is probably the right thing to
fiddle with but I wouldn't have a clue what you're meant to type into
the box next to it.  My preferred solution is to switch off KDE's sound
server (which is only used for making obnoxious noises anyway) and let
everything speak directly to /dev/dsp.

Arts and Gstreamer are, for most people, just incredibly overengineered
solutions for allowing multiple applications to access the sound card at
once.  (Well, they do a few other neat tricks too.)  The SB Live does
hardware mixing so this isn't a problem, and the main reason to want
Arts/esound/Gstreamer/whatever goes away.

If you don't compile support for your onboard sound card into the
kernel, you want have to mess with this.  Or build it as a module, and
never load it unless you really want to.  (Automatic hardware detection
may make this tricky though.)

HTH,

Cameron.