On: PipeWire: The Linux audio/video bus

[Delk]

In the early 00's (before PulseAudio), my desktop had an old SoundBlaster Live PCI card that was pretty common around the turn of the millennium. ALSA dmix Just Worked with that one.

Any other hardware I encountered required some kind of software mixing, IIRC. Not that my experience was extensive, but I got the impression that hardware or driver support for dmix wasn't that common.

[onli → Delk]

> Any other hardware I encountered required some kind of software mixing, IIRC.

Yes, that was dmix :) And it fits the timeline, hardware mixing was killed off back then by soundcard vendors/microsoft, iirc.

[vetinari → onli]

Hardware mixing was killed, because it turned out that it is more efficient to mix several streams with CPU and move just a single one via the bus. It was also more flexible and without weird limits - for example, GUS could mix 14 streams at 44,1 kHz, and if you went above (up to 32), the frequency of each stream went down.

[vetinari → Delk]

Dmix was that software mixing; in the early 00's there were some cards capable of mixing in hardware and dmix was not used for them.

[Delk → vetinari]

Okay, I guess I've got it wrong then. Thanks for the clarification.