[OT] Other apps talk to /dev/dsp ...

[sofar]

On Mon, 13 Feb 2006 15:38:42 -0500 (EST), Patrick Wiseman <pwiseman at mindspring.com> wrote:
> ... what's the mixer's problem?

it's not intended to be smart - it just checks for alsa presence and tries to
use it. Alsa then has no clue what to do since the alsa-driver level is not
present.

> Sound works fine on my laptop (xmms plays, eg).  But xfce4-mixer
> apparently won't acknowledge that my sound device is /dev/dsp.  When run
> from the command line, it reports:
> 
> alsa: Mixer attach default error: No such device

because you are apparently using the old OSS driver. The ESS maestro should be
perfectly supported by alsa, so perhaps you want to switch from the old-and-deprecated
OSS driver to the alsa driver instead. That should make the mixer happy too.

Auke