esd prevents sound working in some apps/games...

[Gabriel M Dragffy]

On Sat, 2006-09-30 at 00:01 -0400, Felipe Alfaro Solana wrote:
> On 9/29/06, Gabriel M Dragffy <dragffy at yandex.ru> wrote:
> > is there a workaround apart from manually killing the esd process? I'm
> > using dapper, latest updates.
> 
> AFAIK, ESD opens the sound device, so if any other application, like
> MPlayer or a game tries opening the device directly, it will fail. I
> think ESD has a feature to automatically closed the sound device after
> some period of inactivity.
> 
> Of course, the only solutions I see are:
> 
> 1. Disable ESD or killing it.
> 2. Configuring ESD to release the sound device after some period of idle time.
> 3. Configure the game to use ESD.
> 4. Everybody using ALSA, which supports hardware/software sound mixing
> which allows several different applications to output sound at the
> same time.
> 

So what's the real point of ESD? What does it do? Even if I kill it's
process I can still get sound from my applications... so why run it?

Also I can't seem to adjust it's idle time-out from
system-preferences-sound