Silence wanted (Silly newbie question)

Lex Spoon lex at cc.gatech.edu
Fri Dec 7 19:05:08 UTC 2001


This is a stupid part of most Linux sound drivers -- only one program
can connect at a time.  Worse, some sound cards *block* when you try to
open them a second time.  I'd love to know how to tell the open to just
give up, if there is another process using it....  but not all sound
drivers allow this.

Anyway, you can solve this problem by using the Network Audio System
(NAS).  Does SuSe have a package for this?  The way it works is that a
"sound server" is the only guy talking directly to the sound device;
other apps talk to the saund server.  Squeak has patches for NAS on my
Squeak site:

	http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~lex/squeak

To deal with other programs that don't support NAS, you can use
"audiooss" -- if SuSe doesn't have it, you can do a web search for it. 
(Probably only Debian has this in it....)


-Lex




More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list