Re: No sound in games using sdl-mixer

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Ludovic Courtès <address@hidden> writes:

> FWIW I just tried ExtremeTuxRacer and it works out of the box for me (on
> GuixSD).
>
> I do use PulseAudio though.  To allow ETR’s sound output to mix with
> other things that may be playing sound already, I have this in my
> ~/.asoundrc:
>
> --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
> pcm.!default {
>     type pulse
> }
> --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---
>
> Should we add it to the account skeletons?

I don’t think that’s a good idea.  This means that the ALSA library will
always try to output to the “pulse” backend, which may not exist.  For
example, I do not use PulseAudio, so I do not have the “pulse” backend,
so this ~/.asoundrc setting would not work in my case.  (I don’t know if
it would do harm, to be fair.)

Is there a better way to make sdl-mixer output to the ALSA backend by
default?  I think outputing to ALSA is a safe default choice, as most
applications do not directly output to PulseAudio but to ALSA.

~~ Ricardo