Re: Is it time for remove (crap) ALSA from kernel tree ?

Takashi Iwai
2007-06-25T12:31:22Z

At Mon, 25 Jun 2007 13:36:23 +0200 (CEST),
Tomasz Kłoczko wrote:
>
> [1 <text/plain; ISO-8859-2 (8bit)>]
> On Mon, 25 Jun 2007, Takashi Iwai wrote:
> [..]
> >> Sound it in not rocket science. In 99.9% cases you need well abstracted
> >> API which ALSA doe not provide and this is real cause why so poor sound
> >> support in Linux applications is. Thin ALSA abstraction is main cause of
> >> avalaibability "tons" of additional soud user space APIs.
> >
> > I disagree about this. Tons of various user-space APIs would be
> > created anyway. It's the nature of FOSS developemnt.
>
> Please recall history of (for example) esound.
> >From esound README:
>
> "Esound is an audio mixing server that allows multiple
> applications to output sound to the same audio device."
>
> It was started in time when most cheap sound cards was without hw mixer.
> And .. when today you use ALSA on sound card without hw mixer still all
> this (past ?) problems are actual.

Huh? I have no problems with soft mixing...

> Look on main reasons developing arts ..
> In documentation many other user space APIs you can find the same
> or similar reasons. Look .. I'm talkimg about real facts. Your
> disagreement completly ommits *reasons* spending some time on preapare
> this soud APIs.
>
> ALSA still does not provides good soud devices virtualization for more
> then one application. Each day I'm using bludy words when I'm try to use
> skype which oppens /dev/mixer after run galeon with flash plugin which
> opens /dev/snd/pcm* or when I start GNOME session with soud enabled
> (handled by esd whuich uses ALSA).

So, do you mean the soft-mixing is the biggest issue? That's just a
part of a design issue, and if we want to go to that way, the
impelemtation would be trivial, regardless on ALSA or not. Totally
irrelevant argument regarding "remove ALSA".

Takashi