Re: [Alsa-devel] OSS driver removal, 2nd round (v2)

[Lee Revell <rlrevell@joe-job.com>]

On Tue, 2006-07-11 at 01:38 +0200, Adam Tlałka wrote:
> Użytkownik Lee Revell napisał:
> > On Mon, 2006-07-10 at 13:28 +0200, Adam Tlałka wrote:
> >> >From my point of view ALSA has many advantages if you want to dig in
> >> the card driver buffers/period etc. settings but lacks ease of use and
> >> some of simple in theory functionality is a pain - device enumeration
> >> or switching output mode/device without restarting apps or rewritting
> >> them so they have special function for that purpose.
> >>
> > 
> > Does any available sound driver interface allow switching output devices
> > with no help from the app and without having to restart playback?  OSS
> > does not, and every Windows app I've used has a configuration option to
> > set the sound device, and you must stop and start playback for it to
> > take effect.
> 
> Sorry but is a Windows solution the best on the whole world?
> Is there any problem to imagine an abstract sound device which virtually 
> always works but uses real device chosen by user, network redirection or 
>   emulating work and we have some control panel/app which can control 
> connections/plugins/redirections etc. (also this can be done by some 
> kind of daemon responding to hw change events)?
> Do we really need to program every sound app to have device setting code?
> 

The problem is you trade ease of development for performance, penalizing
the users to save developer time.  Your proposals would require every
app to go through a software buffering layer.

Of course, you're free to develop a system like this.

> >> esd, arts, jackd, polypd and other prove that ALSA is not enough
> >> and its functionality is far from perfect.
> >>
> > 
> > esd and artsd are no longer needed since ALSA began to enable software
> > mixing by default in release 1.0.9.
>  >
> 
> So why they are still exist in so many Linux distributions?
> 

Backwards compatibility, bugs still being worked out, waiting for
upstream to catch up, etc.  Same reason that distros never have the very
latest version of every app.

> > As for jackd and other apps that
> > provide additional functionality - no one ever claimed ALSA would handle
> > every audio related function imaginable.  It's just a low level HAL.
> 
> Format changing, resampling, mixing and supporting additional plugins
> does not seems to be just low level HAL for hw device. It creates some 
> kind of virtual functionality which means more then this provided by 
> hardware device itself.

OK, but my point is that it does not make sense to put every imaginable
audio feature in ALSA.

Lee