Re: Re: [PATCH] Add support for Acer TravelMate and

[Lee Revell <rlrevell@joe-job.com>]

On Thu, 2006-03-02 at 09:19 +1030, Jonathan Woithe wrote:
> > >> I would not be surprised if some vendors were leaving out the DAC from
> > >> their CD drives, and expect you to play audio CDs in digital mode.  I
> > >> believe this is how Windows Media Player works by default (it also
> > >> allows it to generate visual effects from the CD audio).
> > >>     
> > > Ah, right.  I wasn't aware of that.  If that's its default behaviour then
> > > perhaps the Acers do expect the OS to use digital mode for playing CDs. If
> > > this proves to be the case then we'll revise the "acer" model to omit the CD
> > > controls.
> > I believe the Gnome CD player and Sound Juicer applications do that too.
> > I think they, just like all other Gnome apps, use the Gstreamer
> > framework. And I can even see a reason for that - most soundcards only
> > have one set of pins for a CD (i.e. only one cd channel) meanwhile many
> > new desktops come with two CD drives. Add to this what Lee has
> > mentioned, and you get quite a set of reasons to use software to extract
> > audio.
> 
> Except it sucks CPU cycles away from more useful tasks and is less capable
> of correcting errors in realtime (at least in my experience).

Well, those arguments apply to everything vendors do to make their gear
cheaper by offloading work to the CPU - Winmodems, non-mixing
soundcards, etc...  it's just how the industry works these days.

Lee



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