[nas] native alsa bottom-end

[Paul Fox]

erik wrote:
 > On Fri, May 12, 2006 at 05:49:41PM -0400, Paul Fox wrote:
 > > has anyone ever looked into writing a native alsa dda layer
 > > for nasd?  
 > 
 > The other way would be nice, too (a plugin for ALSA to output to NAS).
 > ;-)

hey!  no thread hijacking!  :-)

 > > mostly the oss compatibility stuff in alsa makes this
 > > unnecessary, but currently i'm having a very odd problem where i
 > > can play sounds via nasd just fine, but can't control the volume. 
 > 
 > With a default configuration nasd changes mixer settings only when
 > playing (or recording). 

i really thought you and jon were wrong about this, but i've only
just realized that on my systems, there's almost always a stream
open to nasd, since my home automation system keeps one open all
the time even when it has nothing to say.  this is probably why
the volume control has always worked in the past, even though i thought
there was nothing "playing".

however, as i said in my last message, that's not my current problem.

 > You should make sure that you're playing something via NAS when trying
 > to change the volume. We had the problem that whenever one user was
 > playing sounds, aupanel did not "work". The solution was that he was
 > using ALSA for sound output instead of NAS.

i've been told on the alsa list that alsa 1.0.9 and above has
support for software mixing of different input sources.  however,
i don't think this works if one of the sources you want to mix is
an OSS source, like nasd.  this would be another excellent reason
to have a native alsa bottom end for nasd -- it might work better
with other native alsa programs.

paul
=---------------------
 paul fox, pgf at foxharp.boston.ma.us (arlington, ma, where it's 45.5 degrees)