Hi all, I was referred here from the #alsa irc channel on freenode. I've been having issues with hardware mixing in ALSA since I started using Linux at least 10 years ago. Sometimes when I am trying to play multiple audio sources at once, one source will stop producing sound or all sound will all of a sudden turn into a mash of loud, jumbled noise. This has occurred across every combination of hardware and distribution of Linux I have used for my personal computers. I was trying to set up a custom dmix configuration to work around the problem, but I could not get multiple audio sources to play with my custom dmix definition. It seems to work if I use dmix:CARD=xxx, but I would like to set my own period_size and other such settings. I was told it is a better idea to try to figure out what the problem is with hardware mixing than to try to work around it with dmix. So here we are. I always thought this was a known problem and that hardware mixing by default was considered "new" or experimental.

Thanks