[sldev] [VWR] openAL wind generator WIP

[Dzonatas]

Carsten Juttner wrote:
> Hm, could you elaborate on this a bit? OpenAL has several audio 
> backends including ALSA. I use the dmix plugin-in to be able to open 
> ALSA from several sources and it works fine.

We need to document the best way.  I started to look into JACK, but 
there is little documentation. It's mainly how nicely sound concurrency 
works between several apps. Some apps, like Gnome, want to use ESD. 
Skype wants to use some form of /dev/dsp (ESD or OSS). Icedove wants to 
use /dev/dsp or ALSA. OpenAL I have set to try to use ALSA, aRts, ESD, 
OSS, or none. Etc...

There is no up-to-date how-to on the best way to get these all to work 
nicely. One app wants steal the sound and another app hangs or crashes. 
It doesn't all work out of the box.

If all other sound drives fail to open, I did get OpenAL to use the null 
device instead of fail to let slviewer continue to run:

~/.openalrc:
(define devices '(alsa native arts esd null))
(define alsa-device "default")
(define speaker-num 2)
(define sampling-rate 44100)


I thought dmix was only needed if the sound card doesn't support a 
hardware mixer, so I opted to try to figure out JACK, but there is 
little documentation.