[Openal] OpenAL Soft's alcOpenDevice returns null

[Chris Robinson]

On Monday 10 March 2008 12:58:21 pm Stephen A. wrote:
> Could alcOpenDevice fail because the device is locked up by another
> application? (e.g. /dev/dsp for ALSA) This might explain the behavior on
> Ubuntu, as OpenAL could conflict with VMWare trying to access the hardware
> at the same time. VMWare reports this error whenever another application
> is using the sound hardware:
> Failed to open sound device /dev/dsp: Device or resource busy
> Failed to connect virtual device sound.

Quite possibly. If the device only has one hardware voice and something has it 
open (eg. aRts, ESD, PulseAudio, OSS), something else trying to open it will 
fail. Only certain devices (ALSA's dmix) will allow apps to share the card, 
but the app has to be set up to use ALSA's dmix (though I think it'll use 
dmix by default as long as the app uses ALSA's default device).