Comment 18 for bug 1530365

Steve wrote by email:

An alternative workaround for bug 276 appears to be to set the output
device to "dmix". I've been testing this for the past couple of days,
and no freezes when using dmix.

The advantage of dmix over "hw:" is that the vast majority of sound
cards do not have hardware mixing, so when the "hw:" device is used,
only one application can use it at a time. On the other hand, dmix is
a plug-in for ALSA that provides mixing, so multiple applications can
use the sound card simultaneously.

The downside of dmix compared to the "hw:" device is that not all
distros install it by default (though I think that most do).

The downside of dmix compared to PulseAudio is that it does not
support recording what is playing on the computer.

PulseAudio would be the best device to use if it were not for bug 276
(and it is the default for most modern Linux desktops).

Do we want to document this somewhere?