[Klug-general] Linux Sound Programming

[George Prowse]

On 21/03/2010 09:56, Karl Lattimer wrote:
>
>> All of them, with perhaps the exception of ALSA seems like it was
>> dreampt up in someone's potting shed as an answer to a problem that
>> never should have existed.
>
> I might forward that little snippet to Lennart Poettering... He loves
> Pulseaudio abuse :P
>
> Developing for pulseaudio is no different from developing for ALSA as
> pulse is just a way of managing all the gumpf that goes on, giving you
> application specific volume controls and various other nifty features
> which make sound useful to the desktop user. It is akin to CoreAudio on
> macosx but with some extra features I think makes it pretty darn
> nifty...
>
> Considering that Lennart, one of the most talented developers in the
> world if you don't believe me, check his stats;
> http://www.ohloh.net/accounts/mezcalero would have designed this in a
> potting shed is a pretty big insult considering; "Your search - george
> prowse - did not match anything." on Ohloh.net

I have nothing out in the wild or anywhere else and I certainly wouldn't 
never even dream of judging myself on the basis of an ego search.
>
> Pulseaudio may not have been perfect through the development, but it's
> getting pretty damn close to where it is supposed to be.
>
> Just to clairfy the "problem that never should have existed";
>
> * ALSA and OSS lock the sound hardware
> * System sounds at the same volume as the movie you're watching
> * Multiple applications using the sound hardware causing blocking e.g.
> play a game for an hour and all the system sounds that happened during,
> playback one after the other.
> * Real time mixing of audio channels
>
> ALSA is a great way of communicating with the hardware but it provides
> no user space management of the audio.
>
My point about any of them/all of them is that people are *still* trying 
to sort these things out when it should have been done 15 years ago. 
Nothing has changed. The have a sound card, they have speakers and they 
have drivers.

The problem is that no-one can decide anything - sound or otherwise. 
Everything just gets drowned by bickering whether foo should be in 
kernelspace or userspace and then some people suggest something radical 
and they get shot down (probably much in the same way that i'm doing 
here) and never come back.

It's a mess out there and until people stop thinking that everything is 
just fine then nothing will ever happen. Pulseaudio could be the 
greatest thing on the face of the planet, we could all bow down, worship 
it and Tom Cruise could jump up and down on a sofa about it but until it 
becomes synonymous with sound on linux then most people will never know.

 From what I see though, there seems to be a significant push by some of 
the larger (and mostly ubuntu derived) distros and the Gnome project for 
pulse so we may be in luck. Well it can't be any worse than arts - that 
was an abomination.