Transgaming comments on Alsa for WineX

Transgaming comments on Alsa for WineX

[R Chan]

Transgaming have investigated Alsa 1 as a sound option to for WineX.

http://www.transgaming.com/showthread.php?news=98

Excerpt

" ALSA, of particular interest to TransGaming's Linux audience, does not 
provide
much of an added benefit over OSS. The primary speed advantage, hardware 
mixing,
a slower kludgy implementation use due to the fact that looping sound 
doesn't appear
to be supported; although full duplex support should be easier to 
provide than with OSS.
The major drawback of ALSA is that its mmap interface is not compatible 
with what is
required for DirectSound unless undocumented interfaces are used. All in 
all it appears
that using ALSA would provide some speed advantages for newer cards, but 
to be
done properly would require a rewrite of the winealsa driver. Thus we 
would suggest
that, for the time being, people continue to use the OSS emulation layer of
ALSA with "MMap" = "Y" enabled in their config file to get the best 
performance if it's supported on their sound card."

Apart from mmap which I guess is architectural and quite difficult to 
change, what about their
comments on looping sound - useful?

Cheers
Richard




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Re: Transgaming comments on Alsa for WineX

[James Courtier-Dutton]

R Chan wrote:
> Transgaming have investigated Alsa 1 as a sound option to for WineX.
> 
> http://www.transgaming.com/showthread.php?news=98
> 
> Excerpt
> 
> " ALSA, of particular interest to TransGaming's Linux audience, does not 
> provide
> much of an added benefit over OSS. The primary speed advantage, hardware 
> mixing,
> a slower kludgy implementation use due to the fact that looping sound 
> doesn't appear
> to be supported; although full duplex support should be easier to 
> provide than with OSS.
> The major drawback of ALSA is that its mmap interface is not compatible 
> with what is
> required for DirectSound unless undocumented interfaces are used. All in 
> all it appears
> that using ALSA would provide some speed advantages for newer cards, but 
> to be
> done properly would require a rewrite of the winealsa driver. Thus we 
> would suggest
> that, for the time being, people continue to use the OSS emulation layer of
> ALSA with "MMap" = "Y" enabled in their config file to get the best 
> performance if it's supported on their sound card."
> 
> Apart from mmap which I guess is architectural and quite difficult to 
> change, what about their
> comments on looping sound - useful?
> 
> Cheers
> Richard
> 

I don't think the winex people have much of a clue about how alsa works 
as I a pretty sure all the bad comments about alsa are untrue.




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