From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "Eugenia Loli-Queru" Subject: The ALSA Situation Date: Tue, 9 Nov 2004 16:24:09 -0800 Message-ID: <016301c4c6bb$a3613fa0$0a00000a@eugenia> Reply-To: "Eugenia Loli-Queru" Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset="iso-8859-1"; reply-type=original Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: Sender: alsa-devel-admin@lists.sourceforge.net Errors-To: alsa-devel-admin@lists.sourceforge.net List-Unsubscribe: , List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , List-Archive: To: alsa-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Cc: torvalds@osdl.org List-Id: alsa-devel@alsa-project.org Hi, I have outlined here the mixing problem of Alsa/OSS (read point #4): http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=8823 I am writing to express my dissapointment over the piss poor desktop experience I get out of 2 of my PCs because of this problem (and I know that there are actually... millions like me as these ac97 onboard cards are everywhere these days). When the alsa driver knows that there is no hardware mixing, a software one should be created automatically, and it should be 100% transparent to all alsa/oss applications or other kde/gnome mixers. It should behave like hardware mixing was there all along. You see, I have already created the dmix plugin utter crap, and LD_PRELOADed the aoss wrapper and have the .asoundrc file in place (and esd, arts, gstreamer, mplayer and xmms configured to use the new "default" alsa device). But even after all this work to figure out how to do all that (it literally took me 2 days of googling and trying to figure out the black magic of alsa scripting) there are too many other sound apps that simply don't obey the dmix plugin. There are apps that they won't even launch until I press "stop" on xmms! Sometimes I even forget that I have launched them, and then I stop xmms, and then sudenly, hours later, the app that was blocked before, it would popup in my face! You call this good usability? Yes, you can claim that some "apps are broken and they don't use the alsa api properly". But I say this to you: if a framework allows for such kinds of problems, then the framework itself is broken, not the apps. Mixing is something that the apps should be getting automatically from ALSA, the developers should not add code to their apps to allow for stuff like "changing the default alsa device". There should NOT be, EVER, an error like "the sound card is used by another app". If this happens, it's a failure of the media framework, NOT the failure of the app (I have never,ever,ever,ever seen such an error on OSX or BeOS). Besides, when I email these devs to add support for alternative alsa devices, they reply "get another sound card". And how the heck am I going to get a new sound card for my laptop, I don't know (the problem is mostly with laptops, as these use these AC97 intel/via cards). I believe that this is an important point for all Alsa developers to read, because I am not alone. Read the comments on that story I link, and you will see that many other people FULLY agree with me that playing one sound at a time when the sound card doesn't have a hardware mixer, is POOR Linux experience. It just kills the impression of the operating system. I am sorry, but from my POV, this mixer situation should be a SHOWSTOPPER for alsa getting released out in the wild. I wouldn't imaging Be, Apple or Microsoft releasing an OS or update where some of their sound drivers didn't have mixing support. It is laughable in 2004 not having proper *transparent* mixing for both Alsa/OSS-emulation via the sound framework on a popular operating system, like Linux is. You replaced OSS for some arguably good reasons, but your solution is equally crappy from where I stand: default muting (!), no proper mixing, ultra-weird scripting that noone really understands, impossible to find out how to enable 5.1 surround (even if the driver is capable of it) etc... Alsa should have been a completely transparent thing as far the user is concerned. Alsa is a framework, and so only developers should be messing with it, not users. If the user needs to unmute the PCM, or write alsa scripts to get some *basic* functionality, then the Alsa project has already failed. Have you ever heard of Windows users talk about "GDI"? No. Why? Because they don't have to. It just works. Same thing on Linux, Alsa or X11 are things that users should not even know what they are. These should just work. Let the users worry about bugs or problems in the higher level skirts of a Linux distro, not the frameworks. I am sorry if I sound a bit angry over this, but I spent days trying to get more than one app to use the sound card at the same time (plus dmix would still not work properly with all apps), and I know that there are many-many others like me, and I am so extremely surprised that the Alsa project hasn't found a better solution for the problem after 4-5 years of development. Rgds, Eugenia ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: Sybase ASE Linux Express Edition - download now for FREE LinuxWorld Reader's Choice Award Winner for best database on Linux. http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=5588&alloc_id=12065&op=click