Re: The ALSA Situation

[Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>]

At Thu, 11 Nov 2004 19:34:46 -0300,
Manuel Jander wrote:
> 
> Hi
> 
> On Thu, 2004-11-11 at 10:23 -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > 
> > On Thu, 11 Nov 2004, Takashi Iwai wrote:
> > > 
> > > Oh, that's hard to tell what should be the "default" parameters.
> > > This strongly depends on the board.
> > 
> > Which is exactly why apps should not even try to set them.
> 
> At last somebody agree :) Frankly IMHO, setting buffer sizes in a sound
> application, seemed always pretty silly thing to me. Its too much
> hardware dependant, to be done inside a user application; sort of out of
> scope.

Hmm, the minimal setting ALSA API requires is not so much: the sample
format, rate, channels, access mode, buffer/period sizes.
I believe these except buffer/period sizes are almost mandatory in
every (native) audio API.  (Of course, the system like JACK is another
story. It converts everything by itself.)

> > My point is that the driver can select some default parameters, and then 
> > users just use them by default, and thus there are no issues of 
> > synchronizing between them.
> 
> Yes, that would be very, very nice. At most, user program should have
> the ability to ask for less_latency or longer_buffering, because that
> relationship obviously is a tradeoff between 2 goodnesses. But most
> current "options" don't actually provide any benefit. If choosen wrong,
> sound output may even not work correctly.
> The less options -> the more likelyhood that it will work (just works
> paradigm).

Here agreed.  The buffer configuration can be more simplified.
Having default values for the templates ("minimal latency" or "robust
playback") would be nice.


Takashi


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