Daniel Joyce wrote:
> 
> On Wednesday 06 February 2002 01:33 pm, you wrote:
> > Tim Rowledge wrote:
> > > Trying
> > > 10000000 timeRepeat: [ Smalltalk beep]
> > > might also be interesting. My guess is that it will make a very long
> > > beeping noise rather than a lot of beeps. Let us know...
> >
> > I tried it in Linux. Results are very strange. There's a more or less
> > continuous static warble interspaced with distinct pulses of beeps. I
> > suspect that the hardware (board speaker) might be having problems
> > keeping up.
> >
> > Stranger yet, by hitting the user interupt I was able -- entirely by
> > accident -- to get XMMS playing an Echo and the Bunnymen track while
> > Squeak carried on beeping (when the interrupt was cancelled)!
> >
> > Cheers
> >
> > John
> 
>         Well, are you using OSS or OSS / Alsa?
> 
>         The sound architecture on Linux, especially under Alsa is very interesting.

Alsa with a cheapo PCI Sound Blaster.
> 
>         The warbling beeps is due to Alsa playing the beeps as fast as possible,
> so the next beep is played before the previous one completes. The distinct
> beep pulses may be from the sound queue filling up, or some other thing
> having to do with buffers.

That explanation certainly fits events better than mine ;-)
> 
>         The fact you can play multiple sounds together should not be suprising, I
> mean, XMMS along with KDE window noises, and other noisy apps, again comes
> from Alsa's sound buffering, and mixing.

I've never really looked into how it works (I'm pretty new to sound as I
only got a Linux compatable sound card about 3 months ago and I've only
used sound in Windows in a completely passive way). But so far I'm
really impressed by it. The next step will be to investigate the Midi
stuff, but that I might leave until I've upgraded to 2.4. (This may take
a while, as I'll be doing it over a dialup connection!)

Cheers

John

-- 
They're afraid, very afraid......
According to CRN magazine, Microsoft staff discovering Linux in use
will have now access to a special 'escalation' team.
Now, where did I put that stake and mallet?
http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=02/01/16/0310222&mode=nocomment