[geeks] Ubuntu sound question - esd w/alsa...

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Tue, 12 Sep 2006 @ 10:33 -0400, Phil Stracchino said:

> On the contrary, it's alive and well, even if no longer natively
> supported in the Linux kernel distribution (and that was the
> semi-crippleware OSS/Lite, anyway); it's worked better for me, on
> Linux, than anything else I've tried on Linux; and it currently
> supports, *to my knowledge*, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD on x86 and AMD64,
> NetBSD on x86, OpenBSD on x86, and SCO OpenServer.

I didn't like OSS, and I had a license for the commercial release for
many years.

My problems with OSS:

	- its API didn't have full support for all sound functions demanded
	  by modern software
	- it didn't fully support hardware acceleration even on my now very
	  old Live! card
	- it didn't fully support the feature set of any card I had
	- it is an extra cost item that almost no one buys, so it cannot
	  server as a useful basis for distributing software with sound
	  support.  

The latter is the ultimate killer, because whatever we use as a UNIX
sound standard has to come with all of the OS distributions by default
so developers can rely on it being there.  This is doubly true for
anything like games or commercial audio software.

That's why I said OSS is dead.  Effectively, it is, because almost no
one has it.

Even if it were the best sound driver and API ever created, that's
meaningless if the majority of UNIX systems don't have it.

UNIX sound support should be *better* than Windows.  Anyone who uses
sound on Windows know how buggy, bloated, and overcomplicated the driver
packages are these days.

> > ALSA is quite a bit better and more ambitious, even though it was
> > rocky for a time.  Still needs more but it is getting better.
> 
> I'll say it was rocky.  The last time I tried it, it just plain wasn't
> usable, period.

When was that and on what hardware?

I don't really like ALSA and was opposed to it initially, but I also
didn't like OSS either.

I don't like ALSA because it is messy, its query functions are broken
(i.e. ask it what devices and functions are present and it lies), and
like OSS it also moves very slowly.

At the same time, ALSA does now work on all of the software I've tried
it with, and uses most of my hardware's acceleration functions, though
not nearly all of its feature set.

It's presentation of available devices is broken.  It lies and claims to
have all kinds of virtual devices that really don't exist, resulting in
your mixer panel being full of controls that do nothing.

The filesystem API for ALSA has a lot more functions and support for
sound applications than the OSS standard, so I see OSS as a dead
end even for that reason.

Unfortunately, the OSS standard is the only real multi-platform default,
which is why a lot of drivers in other UNIX systems mimic how it works.

For example, I'm pretty sure FreeBSD's sound devices all mimic Linux OSS
interfaces.  Let's put it this way, I never had to rewrite software for
FreeBSD when using the Live! pcm driver.  I suppose it could have only
been that one driver though.


-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["I wish life was not so short. Languages
take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about." - J.
R. R. Tolkien]