Re: format specification problem

[Abramo Bagnara <abramo@alsa-project.org>]

Paul Davis wrote:
> 
>  [ those of you on jack-dev will have seen this coming ]
> 
> ALSA doesn't seem to provide a way for a driver to way "i provide
> samples in the native format of the processor". The specific case in
> point that I'm noticing is the Hammerfall, where we currently say that
> it supports S32_LE. This is not strictly true. It supports S32_LE when
> it has the x86-friendly EPROM, and S32_BE when it has the ppc-friendly
> EPROM. But it can't support them both at the same time. Moreover,
> there isn't any way to find out which EPROM it has - its assumed that
> the user is sufficiently smart not to have installed a PPC version on
> an x86 system (I actually had a user recently who had this problem and
> didn't realize it - they spent days trying to figure why their samples
> were byte-swapped).
> 
> If an application wants to ask for S32 in "native" format, it can do
> that, but <alsa/asoundlib.h> will convert that into either S32_LE or
> S32_BE, and when we get down the driver level, it will fail on some
> systems.
> 
> How can we address this? I doubt that the Hammerfall is the only card
> with this problem ...
> 

Actually they're two different cards, so they need to be treated as
such. I think that a module option is a suitable solution.

-- 
Abramo Bagnara                       mailto:abramo@alsa-project.org

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