RE: question regarding latest CS4205 laptop soundcard driver

["Ivica Bukvic" <ico@fuse.net>]

> > *There is esd, which is outdated and simply crappy.
> > *There is artsd, which is better, but not good enough, and again,
the
> > app must be made to be aware of it in order to utilize it.
> > *There is JACK project which has a huge potential but none of its
> > effects are again universal, nor backwards-compatible with already
> > released software.
> > *There is Gstreamer, but I do not honestly know enough about it.
> 
> Then make them better.

While I would like to thank you for your prompt response, I want to
point out that I find your above statement rather discouraging. Not
everyone is a low-level programmer, and not everyone should be one. Yet,
with such statement you are implying exactly that: "for one to use Linux
for multimedia, one has to be prepared to be able to do low-level coding
in an environment that inherently suffers from lack of documentation."

Although I've provided my humble coding contributions to the Linux
community, I am by no means an adept programmer who is capable of
dealing with the low-level stuff such as this (needless to say I have no
clue where to start since documentation is less than sparse). Besides, I
would love to help any of these projects to reach their "ripeness," but
find most of them to be focused on things that need less urgent
attention (i.e. JACK, as I understand it, focuses on inter-app audio
communication in a highly efficient manner, requiring app-side
implementation for any kind of dsp resource sharing, thus meaning there
is currently no planned backwards-compatibility, unless the older apps
are adapted to its architecture, which in itself is a rather far-fetched
assumption that the other application developers will be willing to
adapt their apps to this yet-and-if-to-be-established-standard).

Majority of the older, but still maintained apps, access the /dev/dsp
resources in an OSS fashion. Since my understanding is that Alsa is
already capable of fooling these through its OSS emulation (that, if I
am not mistaken, already transparently exists between the actual dsp
resource and the app), wouldn't it be a rather easy step to make it also
be capable of accepting multiple queries and down-mixing them before
sending them to the actual dsp?

Finally, why not merge the efforts of all these different
groups/projects into one concise solution, rather than a dozen
half-working ones?

Sincerely,

Ico



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