Sound card in use?

[David A. Sinck]

\_ SMTP quoth George Toft on 4/19/2002 08:55 as having spake thusly:
\_
\_ How can I tell if an application is using the sound card?  I'm writing
\_ a script that needs to play a sound, but only if the sound card is not
\_ currently being used.  What I'm doing right now is:
\_ 
\_ 	IN_USE=`lsof | grep dsp`
\_ 
\_ Which works, but I know lsof can impose a performance hit.  Any ideas?

See if there's a cautionary file lock on /dev/dsp?  I don't remember
if I was getting file-lock errors or perm errors when I 'fixed' this. 

If the box is running esd, you *might* be able to grok the output of
esdctl serverinfo or esdctl allinfo into something meaningful?

Good question.

David