Arch Linux

weirddan455

Member

Registered: 2012-04-15

Posts: 213

How many ALSA applications can play sound at once?

I ran into a strange issue where I had Counter-Strike:GO running (sound working fine in the game itself) but when I alt-tabbed, no other application could play sound.  VLC would complain my device was busy and Chromium didn't show an error but sound didn't work either (tested with a YouTube video.)  I was able to solve this by changing the audio setting in CS:GO from 5.1 surround to 2 speaker (I use headphones so no need for surround) so now I can alt-tab and still have sound in other applications.

What I want to know now is why that is?  Is there a limit to the number of simultaneous channels or what?  I just tested and with CS:GO set to 2 channel I can play sound from CS:GO, Chromium, VLC, and Banshee all at the same time but with 5.1 CS:GO hogs the sound card all to itself.

I'm also curious about where PulseAudio fits into this.  Right now I'm just using pure ALSA.  If I were to get a surround setup one day would PulseAudio overcome this limitation and allow me to play music while I game?

brebs

Member

Registered: 2007-04-03

Posts: 3,742

Re: How many ALSA applications can play sound at once?

See list of gotchas.

The main issue you probably have is that Dmix doesn't work with more than stereo - *unless* you use something like my sample config.

ALSA is flexible, which means it will allow naughty apps to block the soundcard for other apps. So, configure your apps also.

ALSA works fine, no need for pulseaudio.