Re: Mac mini sound woes

[Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>]

At Tue, 29 Mar 2005 14:05:08 -0500,
Lee Revell wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 2005-03-29 at 21:04 +1000, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
> > Can the driver advertize in some way what it can do ? depending on the
> > machine we are running on, it will or will not be able to do HW volume
> > control... You probably don't want to use softvol in the former case...
> > 
> > dmix by default would be nice though :)
> 
> No, there's still no way to ask the driver whether hardware mixing is
> supported yet.  It's come up on alsa-devel before.  Patches are welcome.

Well I don't remember the discussion thread on alsa-devel about this,
but it's a good idea that alsa-lib checks the capability of hw-mixing
and apples dmix only if necessary.  (In the case of softvol, it can
check the existence of hw control by itself, though.)

Currently, dmix is enabled per driver-type base.  That is, dmix is set
to default in each driver's configuration which is known to have no hw
mixing functionality.

> dmix by default would not be nice as users who have sound cards that can
> do hardware mixing would be annoyed.  However, in the upcoming 1.0.9
> release softvol will be used by default for all the mobo chipsets.

On 1.0.9, dmix will be default, too, for most of mobo drivers.


Takashi