On 900960124 seconds since the Beginning of the UNIX epoch
Bill Studenmund wrote:
>
>On Sun, 19 Jul 1998, Ken Hornstein wrote:
>
>> I think that there's no reason a properly-written driver shouldn't
>> allow multiple instances of itself.  Whether or not the hardware
>> supports it is another question, but it _should_ work.  I can't think
>> of any reason you might want more than one sound card per system,
>> but I'm sure there are some ...
>
>I can think of one. You're trying to simulate music which has a large
>number of simultaneous voices, like a symphony or an organ. For the
>latter, to get things right, you need one voice per pipe. Often the
>registration (selection of active stops) is such that one key on the
>manual sounds 3 to 15 pipes. If you want to support 8 simultaneous notes,
>you'll need from 24 to 120 voices.
>
>Many many sound cards would help. :-)
>
>And the fact that we'd support it would give us another selling point. :-)

Or perhaps you want to play background music, but have standard window
sounds coming from a different set of speakers.  Or you want to implement
surround sound, or have a set of speakers in a different room, but
have a unified stereo interface on your computer.

I think that it would be nice to be able to glue sound cards together
to get the surround deal going.  I don't have a suggestion about how to
do it, but the current interface would require the app to open multiple
sound cards and understand what is going on...  Whereas the audio driver
could know where all the speakers are and split the sounds up to the
right places.

 .. Roland