Re: play-sound-file & esd

[David Hansen <david.hansen@gmx.net>]

On Tue, 09 May 2006 16:41:19 -0400 Richard Stallman wrote:

>     I use a vanilla fc5. I think it already uses alsa (it has alsa-lib and
>     alsa-utils 1.0.11 installed).
>
> Can someone tell Sam how to make sure of whether it is running
> Alsa, and if so, which version?

Make sure the volume is low and

$ cat /dev/urandom >  /dev/audio

You should here the nice sound of urandom.  This means the
alsa drivers are working.

To make the software mixer work i also had to write a
/etc/asound.conf (i just c&p the example from
http://www.pseudorandom.co.uk/2004/debian/alsa/).

Now just start some apps that use alsa as the audio output
device e.g.:

$ ogg123 -q -d alsa09 Tom_Waits_-_01_-_Tom_Trauberts_Blues.ogg &

is working for me.

BTW ogg123 uses libao to play sounds and the user can decide
himself which device / sound daemon is used.  Maybe worth to
think about that option.

To get the version number...  I don't know.  On my debian
system i have libasound2 installed, apt-cache says it has
version 1.0.11-3 and pkg-config --version asound says 0.20.

And thanks to the guy who pointed out that GNU/Linux finally
has a software mixer in the kernel.

David