Buggy hardware mixing

[Kevin Maciel]

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