ALSA dmix Questions

[Steve Holmes]

I keep hearing comments about using dmix so a device can be shaared
between software speech and other sound sources.  I have one laptop here
that cannot share its device with a standard alsa configuration.  How
does one implement dmix? I see a definition for dmix in the
/usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf.  At present, I do not have a .asoundrc nor
/etc/asound.conf defined as I haven't needed them yet.  I looked around
the alsa-project website but haven't found much.  Since some people have
done that around here, I thought I'd ask here for some quick ideas.  I
don't need to add anything to a kernel configuration, do I?

The laptop I have in question has an older Yamaha type card that got
linked up as an ISA device if I remember off top of my head.  I use
Slackware 11.0, with Linux 2.6.20 Kernel.  When I attempt to play a wav
file with something like aplay -D dmix something.wav, I get an error
that no chanels found so it at least, finds a device but not chanels.  I
figure it is a confiuration issue.

Any ideas?

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