Re: format specification problem

[Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>]

At Wed, 24 Apr 2002 20:55:56 -0400,
Paul Davis wrote:
> 
> 
>  [ those of you on jack-dev will have seen this coming ]
> 
> ALSA doesn't seem to provide a way for a driver to way "i provide
> samples in the native format of the processor". The specific case in
> point that I'm noticing is the Hammerfall, where we currently say that
> it supports S32_LE. This is not strictly true. It supports S32_LE when
> it has the x86-friendly EPROM, and S32_BE when it has the ppc-friendly
> EPROM. But it can't support them both at the same time. Moreover,
> there isn't any way to find out which EPROM it has - its assumed that
> the user is sufficiently smart not to have installed a PPC version on
> an x86 system (I actually had a user recently who had this problem and
> didn't realize it - they spent days trying to figure why their samples
> were byte-swapped).
>  
> If an application wants to ask for S32 in "native" format, it can do
> that, but <alsa/asoundlib.h> will convert that into either S32_LE or
> S32_BE, and when we get down the driver level, it will fail on some
> systems. 

simply use SNDRV_PCM_FORMAT_S32 (without _LE/_BE suffix) ?
then the byte-order is determined at the compile time.

but i vote for Abramo's proposal, since the mismatching may happen as
you wrote.  it should be configurable via module option or something
like that.


Takashi