RE: question regarding latest CS4205 laptop soundcard driver

RE: question regarding latest CS4205 laptop soundcard driver

[Ivica Bukvic]

First off, thanks for your reply.

I am, however, baffled by what you had to say. Crystal company claims
complete Linux "friendliness" and I've seen several sites which carry
detailed specs of the CS4205 chip in PDF file, so I am not sure what
aspect of the sound chip is missing for such information to be complete.
Could you please clarify your point?

Also, is there a way to contact Crystal company and request additional
info?

Finally, if this soundcard is not capable of hardware downmixing, is
there ANY laptop soundcard at all out there that IS capable of doing
that.

P.S. What about Yamaha/Intel 753 chip that is found in the Toshiba
Satellite 5005's?

Thanks for your assistance!

Ico

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Patrick Shirkey [mailto:kotau@firstlinux.net]
> Sent: Tuesday, February 26, 2002 2:25 AM
> To: Ivica Bukvic; alsa-user@alsa-project.org
> Subject: Re: [Alsa-devel] question regarding latest CS4205 laptop
> soundcard driver
> 
> --- "Ivica Bukvic" <ico@fuse.net> wrote:
> >Hi all!
> >
> >I have a quick question regarding the latest CrystalClear soundcard
that
> >is found in Dell Inspirons and other laptops (model name CS4205).
> >
> >My understanding is that the maker of this DSP chip is rather Linux
> >friendly, so my question is does the driver for this soundcard (which
I
> >believe is Intel810 and has been reported to be working in Linux)
> >supports hardware mixing (i.e. opening sound device multiple times as
is
> >the case with SBLive!), since this card also advertises having
hardware
> >mixer like SBLive! does. I=92ve also heard that most other modern
> >mainstream soundcards have that capability and some of them simply
> don=92t
> >do that due to lack of documentation (i.e. Ess maestro 3i). So what
is
> >then the case with this one and how does it stack-up against other
> >mobile built-in soundcards?
> >
> 
> IIRC The docs for this chip are not sufficient for the hardware mixing
to
> be used.
> 
> In regards to how well it works I have had ok sound from it and have
> recorded quite clean through it but it is nothing special IMO.
> 
> 
> --
> Patrick Shirkey - Boost Hardware Ltd
> For the discerning hardware connoisseur
> Http://www.boosthardware.com
> Http://www.boosthardware.com/LAU/Linux_Audio_Users_Guide/
> 
> >Ivica Ico Bukvic, composer, multimedia sculptor,
> >programmer, webmaster & computer consultant
> >http://meowing.ccm.uc.edu/~ico/
> >ico@fuse.net
>
>=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3
D=
> 3D=
> >=3D=3D=3D
> >"To be is to do"=A0=A0 - Socrates
> >"To do is to be"=A0=A0 - Sartre
> >"Do be do be do"=A0=A0 - Sinatra
> >"I am"=A0=A0=A0=A0=A0=A0=A0=A0=A0=A0=A0=A0 - God
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >_______________________________________________
> >Alsa-devel mailing list
> >Alsa-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
> >https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/alsa-devel
> 
> _____________________________________________________________
> Want a new web-based email account ? ---> http://www.firstlinux.net
> 
> _____________________________________________________________
> You deserve a better email address! Get personalized email @yourname
> or @yourcompany from Everyone.net --> http://www.everyone.net?tag



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RE: question regarding latest CS4205 laptop soundcard driver

[Dan Hollis]

On Tue, 26 Feb 2002, Ivica Bukvic wrote:
> I am, however, baffled by what you had to say. Crystal company claims
> complete Linux "friendliness"

What is claimed and what is provided is two completely different things. 
Crystal still does not provide complete documentation for CS4630.

> and I've seen several sites which carry detailed specs of the CS4205 
> chip in PDF file, so I am not sure what aspect of the sound chip is 
> missing for such information to be complete.

CS4205 is purely a standard AC97 codec, it's only an AD/DA convertor and 
mixer. The real soundchip is in your laptop southbridge -- the intel 
82901. So use the alsa 'intel8x0' driver.

> Also, is there a way to contact Crystal company and request additional
> info?

IIRC there are some crystal guys on the list. They have promised some 
future solution to the CS4630 problem but nothing has happened yet.

> P.S. What about Yamaha/Intel 753 chip that is found in the Toshiba
> Satellite 5005's?

All yamaha 75x should be supported with the alsa 'ymfpci' driver.

-Dan
-- 
[-] Omae no subete no kichi wa ore no mono da. [-]


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Re: question regarding latest CS4205 laptop soundcard driver

[Ivica Bukvic]

> The trident cards can also do this. I believe that all cards that are
> actually capable of doing this and for which the docs have been
> provided have ALSA drivers that support it.

Well that's exactly where lies the problem. Most of the laptop
soundcards have marginal Alsa (and for that matter OSS) support. The
only ones that I am aware of so far of being able to do multiple
hardware streams in Linux are es1969 (thanks to Patrick Shirkey) and
Trident that you have mentioned (although I am not sure what model and
in what laptop), and possibly Yamaha chipset. That is rather sparse
choice and usually laptops that utilize these are either outdated or
have other peripherals weak (i.e. marginal video card).

>    Windows (WDM):     i don't know.

WDM is good, since Sonar claims sub-7 ms latencies on average sound
hardware in XP right out of the box.

> They don't do it flawlessly. It works for many simple cases. ASIO,
> which until WDM showed up was by far the preferred driver API for
> audio, doesn't allow device sharing at all AFAIK. 

I agree, my "flawless" statement was certainly overrated. Yet, the
question remains: what am I to do as a musician needing to utilize my
portable laptop while the apps/software I currently use get ported to
the JACK architecture (if they get ported at all)? Please don't get me
wrong, I do like to do programming, and I am about to join JACK
community. Yet, I need to continue "churning" music as well in order to
finish my degree. Programming alone will not get me there, although I
love Linux for what it is, and would love to contribute as much as my
time allows.

> don't consider it so rudimentary. you think of it as basic because
> Windows and MacOS did it, but they did it at the expense of
> low latency use. When Apple finally fixed this (with CoreAudio), they
> have forced not only a completely new API but for many people
> (non-ASIO developers), a whole new design on their developer community.

Well, what if we had at least a temporary, even higher-latency solution,
so that I could at least get some work done without worrying about these
serious software limitations and trying to come-up with poor and
temporary work-arounds?

Thanks for your insightful comments! Sincerely,

Ico



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Re: question regarding latest CS4205 laptop soundcard driver

[Paul Davis]

>I agree, my "flawless" statement was certainly overrated. Yet, the
>question remains: what am I to do as a musician needing to utilize my
>portable laptop while the apps/software I currently use get ported to
>the JACK architecture (if they get ported at all)? 

1a) Get Abramo to post (or point to) detailed information on using a
   "share" PCM device

1b) Get Abramo or Jaroslav to post (or point to) detailed information
   on setting up libaoss (specifically, how to map /dev/dspN to a specific
   ALSA PCM device)

2) edit your ~/.asoundrc file to define a "share" PCM device

3) run all your legacy (OSS) apps with LD_PRELOAD set to preload libaoss.
      a small wrapper script is useful for this; ALSA may already
      come with one (*)

4) run all your newer (ALSA) apps with an argument telling it to use
     the "share" PCM device

and you should be done. if, that is, the "share" device type is really
working. if not, you can help us debug it.

--p

(*) something like:

% cat aoss
#!/bin/sh

export LD_PRELOAD=/where/i/put/libaoss.so
exec $*
% 

then you can just run OSS apps like this: 

% aoss oss-app-name oss-app-args...

i know this appears hacky. like i said, there is no way around this
because of the way OSS was designed.




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RE: question regarding latest CS4205 laptop soundcard driver

[Ivica Bukvic]

> 1a) Get Abramo to post (or point to) detailed information on using a
>    "share" PCM device
> 
> 1b) Get Abramo or Jaroslav to post (or point to) detailed information
>    on setting up libaoss (specifically, how to map /dev/dspN to a
specific
>    ALSA PCM device)
> 
> 2) edit your ~/.asoundrc file to define a "share" PCM device
> 
> 3) run all your legacy (OSS) apps with LD_PRELOAD set to preload
libaoss.
>       a small wrapper script is useful for this; ALSA may already
>       come with one (*)
> 
> 4) run all your newer (ALSA) apps with an argument telling it to use
>      the "share" PCM device
> 
> and you should be done. if, that is, the "share" device type is really
> working. if not, you can help us debug it.
> 
> --p
> 
> (*) something like:
> 
> % cat aoss
> #!/bin/sh
> 
> export LD_PRELOAD=/where/i/put/libaoss.so
> exec $*
> %
> 
> then you can just run OSS apps like this:
> 
> % aoss oss-app-name oss-app-args...
> 
> i know this appears hacky. like i said, there is no way around this
> because of the way OSS was designed.
> 

Wow, finally a huge step forward!:-)

I really do not care if it is a hacker-like way of doing stuff as long
as it works. I will try fiddling with what you gave me and post some
results when (and if) I get anywhere with it... Thanks once more for a
concise explanation...

Is there anyone else with some kind of experience in this field? Maybe
it is time to start documenting this potentially awesome feature... I
could easily provide webspace and/or maintain the docs webpage if
needed, as long as I can get a pool of people working on this issue with
me... Anyone interested?

Ico



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Re: question regarding latest CS4205 laptop soundcard driver

[Steve Harris]

On Wed, Feb 27, 2002 at 02:11:18 -0500, Ivica Bukvic wrote:
> Well that's exactly where lies the problem. Most of the laptop
> soundcards have marginal Alsa (and for that matter OSS) support. The
> only ones that I am aware of so far of being able to do multiple
> hardware streams in Linux are es1969 (thanks to Patrick Shirkey) and
> Trident that you have mentioned (although I am not sure what model and
> in what laptop), and possibly Yamaha chipset. That is rather sparse
> choice and usually laptops that utilize these are either outdated or
> have other peripherals weak (i.e. marginal video card).

I believe that the Maestro3i in the dell 8100 can do multiple streams:
I can run xmms (oss emulation) and jack (alsa native) at the same
time, though that might be down to something else.

- Steve

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RE: question regarding latest CS4205 laptop soundcard driver

[Patrick Shirkey]

--- "Ivica Bukvic" <ico@fuse.net> wrote:
>> > *There is esd, which is outdated and simply crappy.
>> > *There is artsd, which is better, but not good enough, and again,
>the
>> > app must be made to be aware of it in order to utilize it.
>> > *There is JACK project which has a huge potential but none of its
>> > effects are again universal, nor backwards-compatible with already
>> > released software.
>> > *There is Gstreamer, but I do not honestly know enough about it.
>> 
>> Then make them better.
>
>While I would like to thank you for your prompt response, I want to
>point out that I find your above statement rather discouraging. Not
>everyone is a low-level programmer, and not everyone should be one. Yet,
>with such statement you are implying exactly that: "for one to use Linux
>for multimedia, one has to be prepared to be able to do low-level coding
>in an environment that inherently suffers from lack of documentation."
>
>Although I've provided my humble coding contributions to the Linux
>community, I am by no means an adept programmer who is capable of
>dealing with the low-level stuff such as this (needless to say I have no
>clue where to start since documentation is less than sparse). Besides, I
>would love to help any of these projects to reach their "ripeness," but
>find most of them to be focused on things that need less urgent
>attention (i.e. JACK, as I understand it, focuses on inter-app audio
>communication in a highly efficient manner, requiring app-side
>implementation for any kind of dsp resource sharing, thus meaning there
>is currently no planned backwards-compatibility, unless the older apps
>are adapted to its architecture, which in itself is a rather far-fetched
>assumption that the other application developers will be willing to
>adapt their apps to this yet-and-if-to-be-established-standard).
>

First let us establish that you want pro quality audio right?

PD will answer this better than I.

Jack is based on the callback paradigm. This is the same as nearly all the "professional" quality sound servers on other leading OS's. Unfortunately it has taken the Linux audio community slightly longer to implement this design. Now that we have it many of the developers of realtime music apps are supporting it. Jack is not a yet-and-if-to-be-established-standard. It is a yet to be finished implementation of the standard.

>Finally, why not merge the efforts of all these different
>groups/projects into one concise solution, rather than a dozen
>half-working ones?
>

And who is going to organise this effort? No seriously you are talking about Jack.

It is the combined knowledge of the LAD community who have been debating the concept for the past 5 years and are now writing the code. If you haven't joined the mailing list for jack then you should. AFAIK everyone is welcome.

>Sincerely,
>
>Ico
>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Alsa-devel mailing list
>Alsa-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
>https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/alsa-devel

--
Patrick Shirkey - Boost Hardware Ltd
For the discerning hardware connoisseur
Http://www.boosthardware.com
Http://www.boosthardware.com/LAU/Linux_Audio_Users_Guide/


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RE: question regarding latest CS4205 laptop soundcard driver

[Patrick Shirkey]

I have a notebook with an es1969 which can mix 4 streams in hardware.

--
Patrick Shirkey - Boost Hardware Ltd
For the discerning hardware connoisseur
Http://www.boosthardware.com
Http://www.boosthardware.com/LAU/Linux_Audio_Users_Guide/


--- "Ivica Bukvic" <ico@fuse.net> wrote:
>First off, thanks for your reply.
>
>I am, however, baffled by what you had to say. Crystal company claims
>complete Linux "friendliness" and I've seen several sites which carry
>detailed specs of the CS4205 chip in PDF file, so I am not sure what
>aspect of the sound chip is missing for such information to be complete.
>Could you please clarify your point?
>
>Also, is there a way to contact Crystal company and request additional
>info?
>
>Finally, if this soundcard is not capable of hardware downmixing, is
>there ANY laptop soundcard at all out there that IS capable of doing
>that.
>
>P.S. What about Yamaha/Intel 753 chip that is found in the Toshiba
>Satellite 5005's?
>
>Thanks for your assistance!
>
>Ico
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Patrick Shirkey [mailto:kotau@firstlinux.net]
>> Sent: Tuesday, February 26, 2002 2:25 AM
>> To: Ivica Bukvic; alsa-user@alsa-project.org
>> Subject: Re: [Alsa-devel] question regarding latest CS4205 laptop
>> soundcard driver
>> 
>> --- "Ivica Bukvic" <ico@fuse.net> wrote:
>> >Hi all!
>> >
>> >I have a quick question regarding the latest CrystalClear soundcard
>that
>> >is found in Dell Inspirons and other laptops (model name CS4205).
>> >
>> >My understanding is that the maker of this DSP chip is rather Linux
>> >friendly, so my question is does the driver for this soundcard (which
>I
>> >believe is Intel810 and has been reported to be working in Linux)
>> >supports hardware mixing (i.e. opening sound device multiple times as
>is
>> >the case with SBLive!), since this card also advertises having
>hardware
>> >mixer like SBLive! does. I=92ve also heard that most other modern
>> >mainstream soundcards have that capability and some of them simply
>> don=92t
>> >do that due to lack of documentation (i.e. Ess maestro 3i). So what
>is
>> >then the case with this one and how does it stack-up against other
>> >mobile built-in soundcards?
>> >
>> 
>> IIRC The docs for this chip are not sufficient for the hardware mixing
>to
>> be used.
>> 
>> In regards to how well it works I have had ok sound from it and have
>> recorded quite clean through it but it is nothing special IMO.
>> 
>> 
>> --
>> Patrick Shirkey - Boost Hardware Ltd
>> For the discerning hardware connoisseur
>> Http://www.boosthardware.com
>> Http://www.boosthardware.com/LAU/Linux_Audio_Users_Guide/
>> 
>> >Ivica Ico Bukvic, composer, multimedia sculptor,
>> >programmer, webmaster & computer consultant
>> >http://meowing.ccm.uc.edu/~ico/
>> >ico@fuse.net
>>
>>=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3
>D=
>> 3D=
>> >=3D=3D=3D
>> >"To be is to do"=A0=A0 - Socrates
>> >"To do is to be"=A0=A0 - Sartre
>> >"Do be do be do"=A0=A0 - Sinatra
>> >"I am"=A0=A0=A0=A0=A0=A0=A0=A0=A0=A0=A0=A0 - God
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >_______________________________________________
>> >Alsa-devel mailing list
>> >Alsa-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
>> >https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/alsa-devel
>> 
>> _____________________________________________________________
>> Want a new web-based email account ? ---> http://www.firstlinux.net
>> 
>> _____________________________________________________________
>> You deserve a better email address! Get personalized email @yourname
>> or @yourcompany from Everyone.net --> http://www.everyone.net?tag

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RE: question regarding latest CS4205 laptop soundcard driver

[Ivica Bukvic]

> > *There is esd, which is outdated and simply crappy.
> > *There is artsd, which is better, but not good enough, and again,
the
> > app must be made to be aware of it in order to utilize it.
> > *There is JACK project which has a huge potential but none of its
> > effects are again universal, nor backwards-compatible with already
> > released software.
> > *There is Gstreamer, but I do not honestly know enough about it.
> 
> Then make them better.

While I would like to thank you for your prompt response, I want to
point out that I find your above statement rather discouraging. Not
everyone is a low-level programmer, and not everyone should be one. Yet,
with such statement you are implying exactly that: "for one to use Linux
for multimedia, one has to be prepared to be able to do low-level coding
in an environment that inherently suffers from lack of documentation."

Although I've provided my humble coding contributions to the Linux
community, I am by no means an adept programmer who is capable of
dealing with the low-level stuff such as this (needless to say I have no
clue where to start since documentation is less than sparse). Besides, I
would love to help any of these projects to reach their "ripeness," but
find most of them to be focused on things that need less urgent
attention (i.e. JACK, as I understand it, focuses on inter-app audio
communication in a highly efficient manner, requiring app-side
implementation for any kind of dsp resource sharing, thus meaning there
is currently no planned backwards-compatibility, unless the older apps
are adapted to its architecture, which in itself is a rather far-fetched
assumption that the other application developers will be willing to
adapt their apps to this yet-and-if-to-be-established-standard).

Majority of the older, but still maintained apps, access the /dev/dsp
resources in an OSS fashion. Since my understanding is that Alsa is
already capable of fooling these through its OSS emulation (that, if I
am not mistaken, already transparently exists between the actual dsp
resource and the app), wouldn't it be a rather easy step to make it also
be capable of accepting multiple queries and down-mixing them before
sending them to the actual dsp?

Finally, why not merge the efforts of all these different
groups/projects into one concise solution, rather than a dozen
half-working ones?

Sincerely,

Ico



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RE: question regarding latest CS4205 laptop soundcard driver

[Ivica Bukvic]

> > P.S. What about Yamaha/Intel 753 chip that is found in the Toshiba
> > Satellite 5005's?
> 
> All yamaha 75x should be supported with the alsa 'ymfpci' driver.

Yes, but does it include hardware mixing?

I do not mean to be hammering this issue into the ground, but Linux OS
as an audio workstation solution has been around for 3 years now, yet
the only soundcard I am aware of that is capable of doing hardware
mixing is SBLive!, and even that one is due to fact that Creative had
their hands in the driver devel.

So my question is since this problem of not being able to open /dev/dsp
(or audio or whatever you desire to call it) more than once (i.e. only
one app can "hog" the audio at one time) is the case with most of the
Linux audio hardware, why is there no solution as of yet to have a
kernel-implemented software mixing of multiple audio streams, so that
the soundcard can be queued from multiple apps/processes? (I am
mentioning kernel implementation, since my guess is that it would
provide better latencies for such stuff) I am involved heavily in
electroacoustic and multimedia projects/composition and am a huge Linux
enthusiast, but am seriously growing tired of this roadblock which I
have to worry constantly about when working on my project(s)/piece(s).

Yes, I know, there are some efforts of implementing workarounds for
this, but none of them are universal:

*There is esd, which is outdated and simply crappy.
*There is artsd, which is better, but not good enough, and again, the
app must be made to be aware of it in order to utilize it.
*There is JACK project which has a huge potential but none of its
effects are again universal, nor backwards-compatible with already
released software.
*There is Gstreamer, but I do not honestly know enough about it.

I am sure there are more. Yet, no viable solution has been provided
despite the fact that even Beos had this solved, needless to mention Mac
and Win os's which do this flawlessly.

So my final question is, is there even any effort being put into solving
this issue in an universal fashion where software mixer would be
transparently intercepting calls to dsp resources (both input and
output) and made them available to any process that requested access to
them, mixing audio output audio streams as needed, while dispatching
audio input streams to as many processes that required input stream?

Now that Alsa has become "default" kernel driver, we should definitely
try to use the opportunity to finally provide this rudimentary, yet
extremely important aspect of audio system.

I overheard that the new 2.5.x kernels have multiplexing feature (which
I am guessing enables sharing of the dev resources -- please correct me
if I am wrong), if so, will this solve this issue?

Any thoughts/news on this issue would be utmostly appreciated!
Sincerely,

Ico




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RE: question regarding latest CS4205 laptop soundcard driver

[Dan Hollis]

On Tue, 26 Feb 2002, Ivica Bukvic wrote:
> > > P.S. What about Yamaha/Intel 753 chip that is found in the Toshiba
> > > Satellite 5005's?
> > All yamaha 75x should be supported with the alsa 'ymfpci' driver.
> Yes, but does it include hardware mixing?

Yes it does.

> So my question is since this problem of not being able to open /dev/dsp
> (or audio or whatever you desire to call it) more than once (i.e. only
> one app can "hog" the audio at one time) is the case with most of the
> Linux audio hardware, why is there no solution as of yet to have a
> kernel-implemented software mixing of multiple audio streams, so that
> the soundcard can be queued from multiple apps/processes?

Because kernelspace is the wrong place to do audio mixing. IIRC the 
problem was solved by userspace libraries and LD_PRELOAD which intercept 
calls from badly-behaved-oss-applications and manage mixing in userspace. 
Although I haven't tried this yet.

> *There is esd, which is outdated and simply crappy.
> *There is artsd, which is better, but not good enough, and again, the
> app must be made to be aware of it in order to utilize it.
> *There is JACK project which has a huge potential but none of its
> effects are again universal, nor backwards-compatible with already
> released software.
> *There is Gstreamer, but I do not honestly know enough about it.

Then make them better.

-Dan
-- 
[-] Omae no subete no kichi wa ore no mono da. [-]


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Re: question regarding latest CS4205 laptop soundcard driver

[Andy Wingo]

On Tue, 26 Feb 2002, Ivica Bukvic wrote:

> *There is JACK project which has a huge potential but none of its
> effects are again universal, nor backwards-compatible with already
> released software.

if you're working on new software, you should look into it.

> *There is Gstreamer, but I do not honestly know enough about it.

this is the reason i replied, and i'll continue replying until people
stop thinking of gstreamer as a sound server. it is not. it is a way to
build applications, not a way to link them together. see the faq on
gstreamer.net if you're still interested.

regards,

wingo.

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Re: question regarding latest CS4205 laptop soundcard driver

[Paul Davis]

>I do not mean to be hammering this issue into the ground, but Linux OS
>as an audio workstation solution has been around for 3 years now, yet
>the only soundcard I am aware of that is capable of doing hardware
>mixing is SBLive!, and even that one is due to fact that Creative had
>their hands in the driver devel.

The trident cards can also do this. I believe that all cards that are
actually capable of doing this and for which the docs have been
provided have ALSA drivers that support it.

However, I agree that the issue of simultaneous access to audio
resources is a critical one. But lets look at how its been dealt with
on other operating systems:

   Windows (pre-WDM): a kernel-side mixer that creates horrible,
                      un-work-aroundable latency and puts a bunch
		      of code that Linus would never accept into
		      the kernel.

   Windows (WDM):     i don't know.

   ASIO:              no device sharing, AFAIK.

   MacOS (without ASIO): like windows pre-WDM, AFAIK.

   Mac OS X:          CoreAudio. Much like JACK, it requires a complete
		      rewrite of all code that interacts with audio
		      hardware. thats why there are very few OS X
		      native audio apps at this time. Unlike Apple,
		      we can't force people to use a particular
		      sound server :(

>I am sure there are more. Yet, no viable solution has been provided
>despite the fact that even Beos had this solved, needless to mention Mac
>and Win os's which do this flawlessly.

They don't do it flawlessly. It works for many simple cases. ASIO,
which until WDM showed up was by far the preferred driver API for
audio, doesn't allow device sharing at all AFAIK. 

Nevertheless, the point remains that under Windows and MacOS, multiple
apps can access audio h/w resources simultaneously regardless of the
hardware involved, certainly if they are not "professional" audio apps.

So what do we have?

>*There is esd, which is outdated and simply crappy.
>*There is artsd, which is better, but not good enough, and again, the
>app must be made to be aware of it in order to utilize it.
>*There is JACK project which has a huge potential but none of its
>effects are again universal, nor backwards-compatible with already
>released software.
>*There is Gstreamer, but I do not honestly know enough about it.

You missed perhaps the most important ones:

* KDE's audio API
* GNOME's audio API
* ALSA "share" devices

KDE and GNOME are both (regrettably) wrapping artsd in their own APIs
that allow device sharing. You could choose to use either of these
systems. They are no good for low latency and/or pro audio, and
probably never can be if they continue to use a server with artsd's
design. 

ALSA "share" devices are, at this time, largely untested by the ALSA
user community. I don't know how well they are working (I don't even
know how to set one up), but if they work as intended, they will
entirely solve this issue in the correct way: apps use the same API as
they would to access a regular PCM device, and the magic just happens.
If you're not willing to sign on to a synchronous execution model like
JACK, then I think you should probably focus on ALSA "share" devices.

The fundamental problem is that the original audio API (OSS) didn't
provide any interposition between the application and the kernel side
driver. That means that mixing either has to be in the kernel, which
nobody will approve of let alone allow, or we have to use a clever but
ugly hack like LD_PRELOAD to create a point at which the data from
these legacy apps can be routed to a better system that can do
mixing. libaoss does this, but it relies on the "share" PCM devices in
order to accomplish what you want. 

>Now that Alsa has become "default" kernel driver, we should definitely
>try to use the opportunity to finally provide this rudimentary, yet
>extremely important aspect of audio system.

don't consider it so rudimentary. you think of it as basic because
Windows and MacOS did it, but they did it at the expense of
low latency use. When Apple finally fixed this (with CoreAudio), they
have forced not only a completely new API but for many people
(non-ASIO developers), a whole new design on their developer community.

>I overheard that the new 2.5.x kernels have multiplexing feature (which
>I am guessing enables sharing of the dev resources -- please correct me
>if I am wrong), if so, will this solve this issue?

has nothing to do with the issue. 

--p

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question regarding latest CS4205 laptop soundcard driver

[Ivica Bukvic]

Hi all!

I have a quick question regarding the latest CrystalClear soundcard that
is found in Dell Inspirons and other laptops (model name CS4205).

My understanding is that the maker of this DSP chip is rather Linux
friendly, so my question is does the driver for this soundcard (which I
believe is Intel810 and has been reported to be working in Linux)
supports hardware mixing (i.e. opening sound device multiple times as is
the case with SBLive!), since this card also advertises having hardware
mixer like SBLive! does. I’ve also heard that most other modern
mainstream soundcards have that capability and some of them simply don’t
do that due to lack of documentation (i.e. Ess maestro 3i). So what is
then the case with this one and how does it stack-up against other
mobile built-in soundcards?

Finally, my last question is whether anyone has had any experience with
Dell’s new line of Inspirons 4100 which have only one fan and have been
relatively altered from the old 4000/8000 models, also whether anyone
knows if that model still has the fan bug like the inspirons 4000/8000
do?

Any help would be greatly appreciated! Sincerely,

Ivica Ico Bukvic, composer, multimedia sculptor,
programmer, webmaster & computer consultant
http://meowing.ccm.uc.edu/~ico/
ico@fuse.net
============================
"To be is to do"   - Socrates
"To do is to be"   - Sartre
"Do be do be do"   - Sinatra
"I am"             - God




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Re: question regarding latest CS4205 laptop soundcard driver

[Steve Harris]

On Mon, Feb 25, 2002 at 07:11:02 -0500, Ivica Bukvic wrote:
> Finally, my last question is whether anyone has had any experience with
> Dell’s new line of Inspirons 4100 which have only one fan and have been
> relatively altered from the old 4000/8000 models, also whether anyone
> knows if that model still has the fan bug like the inspirons 4000/8000
> do?

My 8100 doesn't appear to hav the fan bug (if you mean latency spikes when
it stops and starts).

the linux-dell-laptops mailing list would be a good place to ask other
questions, but no-one there uses alsa.

- Steve 

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