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

Adam Tlałka
2006-07-10T23:39:44Z

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?

>> 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?

> 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.

Regards
--
Adam Tlałka mailto:atlka@pg.gda.pl ^v^ ^v^ ^v^
Computer Center, Gdańsk University of Technology, Poland
PGP public key: finger atlka@sunrise.pg.gda.pl