Hello,

I am working on an audio-application with java 1.4, and I noticed that 
with the current alsa-release the time neccessary to initialize my 
Terratec DMX6fire card for playback (in oss emulation mode) increased a 
lot since older versions.

I wrote a small program to measure the time it takes for simply starting 
the playback of a wav/aiff file. I noticed that the 0.9.8 release uses a 
_lot_ more time on the AudioSystem.getMixerInfo() call (which searches 
for all available devices) than older versions. I also noticed that the 
times differ a lot for different JDKs, so here are the results for the 
sun-jdk-1.4.2.01, blackdown-jdk-1.4.1 and ibm-jdk-1.4.1 with the 
different alsa-driver versions.

alsa-driver 0.9.2 - 0.9.3a:
sun:  3.2- 3.3 sec     bdn:  1.9- 2.0 sec   ibm:  0.7- 0.8 sec

alsa-driver 0.9.3b - 0.9.7:
sun:  6.2- 6.3 sec     bdn: 13.7-13.8 sec   ibm:  3.7- 3.9 sec

alsa-driver 0.9.8:
sun: 48.0-48.5 sec     bdn: 24.7-24.8 sec   ibm: 13.7-13.8 sec

alsa-driver cvs-nov-02:
sun: 20.7-20.9 sec     bdn: 24.8-24.9 sec   ibm: 13.8-13.9 sec

So things got worse between 0.9.3a and .b (the same moment the 
mplayer-oss-emulation-delay problem occured!) and 0.9.7 and 0.9.8. 
Current CVS version is working a bit better for sun's jdk, but not for 
the others. I did not try different alsa-lib versions (used 0.9.2 all 
the time) - don't know if this would make any difference.

I attached the source code of the small programm, its syntax is:

java AudioTest AUDIOFILE [DEVICE_NO]

where DEVICE_NO is the index of the java-mixer-device to be used (they 
get listed if you start it without the second parameter)

Gruss,
Steffen