Re: play-sound-file & esd

[Richard Stallman]

    >     Maybe a solution would be to make it possible to configure an external
    >     player command, when the internal method is not suficient?
    >
    > If that works, it is good.  For instance, if working thru esd can be
    > done conveniently by forking an external program, that would be an ok
    > implementation.

    we are going in circles.

No we aren't.

    I already said before (in http://article.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel:53961):

    if esd just happens not to be running at the moment, then esdplay will
    just hang.  i.e., before running esdplay, one has to ensure that esd is
    up and running (and is in a workable state).

That is true, but it does not conflict with what I said.  Using
esdplay could be an ok implementation for how to make Emacs output to
esd.

Of course, outputting to esd (by any method) will only work when esd
is running.  So this can't be the whole solution, only part of one.
Emacs would have to know the method to output to each of the various
sound demons, and know how to decide which method to use.

The point is that implementing several methods could be easy if they
can all work by running external programs such as (for example)
esdplay.

That still would leave the question of how to decide which method to
use.  I don't know how hard that is.

Outputting directly to ALSA could also be a good solution.  That would
have to be implemented at C level as far as I know.

And we have to get to the bottom of the anomaly that you are running
ALSA 1.0.11, which supposedly has a software mixer, but your
observation is that it does not allow multi-open.