Re: ALSA related comments - please correct

[James Courtier-Dutton <James@superbug.demon.co.uk>]

Jaroslav Kysela wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> 	we discovered your notes about ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound 
> Architecture) on your web pages:
> 
> http://www.transgaming.com/showthread.php?news=98
> 
> 	Please, let me comment ALSA issues. Perhaps, your development 
> people should contact us directly before making such bad assumptions.
> 
> 
>>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
> 
> 
> What's looping sound? You can initiate endless ring buffer looping when
> you set stop_threshold to boundary (sw_params). I think that this 
> major drawback does not exist.
> 
> 
>>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.
> 
> 
> We can do everything with our API like OSS and our API has many other 
> extensions which OSS does not have.
> 
> Again, please, tell your developers that they are wrong and remove this 
> paragraph from your pages, because this text hurt us.
> 
> 						Jaroslav Kysela
> 						The ALSA project leader
> 
> -----
> Jaroslav Kysela <perex@suse.cz>
> Linux Kernel Sound Maintainer
> ALSA Project, SuSE Labs
> 
Jaroslav, wine's support for alsa has always been badly implemented. I 
have had to use wine's oss module linking to alsa emulation to get sound 
out. If someone from the wine project can educate me on the win32 sound 
api, I am sure I could get wine to support alsa properly.
Whether win32 needs mmap, callback model, and looping, alsa can be made 
to handle all these.
I will probably do it for wine instead of winex though, because I would 
want the resulting code to be free, and not cost money like winex does.

Cheers
James


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