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0 pointsonli5y ago0 comments

I don't remember this at all, but this might explain that. Or maybe a distribution like debian stable shipped with an outdated ALSA version, taken from the short period between release and dmix. Or just disabled dmix. Would love if someone remembered specifics.

I kinda assumed people mix up Alsa and OSS or don't remember anymore what actually did and what did not work before Pulseaudio was introduced.

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Delk5y ago

In the early 00's (before PulseAudio), my desktop had an old SoundBlaster Live PCI card that was pretty common around the turn of the millennium. ALSA dmix Just Worked with that one.

Any other hardware I encountered required some kind of software mixing, IIRC. Not that my experience was extensive, but I got the impression that hardware or driver support for dmix wasn't that common.

onliOP5y ago

> Any other hardware I encountered required some kind of software mixing, IIRC.

Yes, that was dmix :) And it fits the timeline, hardware mixing was killed off back then by soundcard vendors/microsoft, iirc.

vetinari5y ago

Hardware mixing was killed, because it turned out that it is more efficient to mix several streams with CPU and move just a single one via the bus. It was also more flexible and without weird limits - for example, GUS could mix 14 streams at 44,1 kHz, and if you went above (up to 32), the frequency of each stream went down.

vetinari5y ago

Dmix was that software mixing; in the early 00's there were some cards capable of mixing in hardware and dmix was not used for them.

Delk5y ago

Okay, I guess I've got it wrong then. Thanks for the clarification.

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0 pointsonli5y ago0 comments

I kinda assumed people mix up Alsa and OSS or don't remember anymore what actually did and what did not work before Pulseaudio was introduced.

0 comments

Delk5y ago

In the early 00's (before PulseAudio), my desktop had an old SoundBlaster Live PCI card that was pretty common around the turn of the millennium. ALSA dmix Just Worked with that one.

onliOP5y ago

> Any other hardware I encountered required some kind of software mixing, IIRC.

Yes, that was dmix :) And it fits the timeline, hardware mixing was killed off back then by soundcard vendors/microsoft, iirc.

vetinari5y ago

Dmix was that software mixing; in the early 00's there were some cards capable of mixing in hardware and dmix was not used for them.

Delk5y ago

Okay, I guess I've got it wrong then. Thanks for the clarification.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse