Tim Rowledge said:
> "Lex Spoon" <lex at cc.gatech.edu> is widely believed to have written:
>
> > This is a stupid part of most Linux sound drivers -- only one program
> > can connect at a time.
> I'm pretty sure the exobox revised sound driver that was able to handle
> multiple sources and mix them was released to whatever was thought to be
> the appropriate place; Duane? Can you remember what happenned?

Yeah, we did put something together that addressed the general
multiple-sound-source problem in legacy Linux applications and released it
to the world *somewhere*, but not sure exactly where.

The strategy was to create a stub driver in the place where applications
were expecting it (/dev/dsp?).  When the driver was opened it was renamed,
then another stub put in its place with the original name (in actual
practice, it has done through symbolic links).  Therefore each application
that opened sound got what appeared to be an unused sound device.  The stub
drivers forwarded their data to a mixer, which had grabbed the *actual*
driver at system startup.  This made it so we could mix MP3 audio from a
closed-source system we had licensed with audio from Squeak.  There was a
minor change to the Squeak VM that we had to make in order to get it to play
nice - as I recall there was something funny it did that was a deep
assumption that it had exclusive access to audio.

-- Duane