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

From: Adam Tlałka
Date: Mon Jul 10 2006 - 19:38:00 EST


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@xxxxxxxxx ^v^ ^v^ ^v^
Computer Center, Gdańsk University of Technology, Poland
PGP public key: finger atlka@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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