safemode wrote:I've never had to use dmix as pretty much any card built within the last half decade should support hardware playback of simultaneous audio streams.
Even my no-name ac97 run nvidia on-board audio whatever chipset does it just as well as sb live 8 years ago did.
You're completely wrong man... many MANY onboard chipsets can only handle one stream, it's the driver the one doing all the mix.
Sometimes (I'm guessing nVidia) the AC97 DC (the digital controller part of the chipset) performs the mixing, but it's certainly not commonplace.
Or maybe you've been blessed with up to date (or modern) distros with properly configured software mixing and whatnot. But it's a necessity of most onboard audio.
safemode wrote:i've had various mobo's since my days with the awe64 and live and that was pretty much the last discrete audio card i ever got. I'm not saying they aren't useful for those in the music industry, but that's a tiny niche compared to the masses. And i've never had a problem with multiple apps playing with audio at the same time.
I bet many others buy discrete audio... I can actually hear (and pretty clearly) the dithering, ripple and god knows how many other signal deficiencies of most onboard audio.
safemode wrote:Though, i also choose hardware suited for linux rather than just at random. I'm not gonna build a system that half the hardware has zero or crap support in linux.
I sometimes fail at that
safemode wrote:But when it comes to onboard audio and such, i can't imagine what kind of chipset doesn't support hardware audio multiplexing so you can have multiple apps output audio at the same time.
Intel HDA, for one.
safemode wrote:I've _NEVER_ come across one as I've never needed dmix. Since this kind of feature has been around since the sb64 days, you've gotta be using some minority board to be lucky enough to have such a chipset. I stick to asus and abit mobos. And i stay away from Via chipsets.
Asus ships a lot of Intel HDA chips...