[Preston] Detection of Sound Cards

[Matthew T. Atkinson]

'ellow,

On Sun, 2004-01-25 at 18:41, Dougie Nisbet wrote:
> configured my SBLIVE into the kernel and it's worked fine. Is there any 
> advantage to using ALSA? I'd hate to think I was missing out on anything! 

To be honest, I have not used OSS enough to really know what ALSA does
that OSS doesn't.  I became curious as to why I was actually using ALSA
:-) (it is a long time since this box was set up -- and when it was I
was still a newbie and had a lot of help from a friend so I don't
remember the rationale behind some decisions), so I found the following
bits of info:

http://www.eca.cx/lad/2002/Mar/0109.html
http://www.linuxhardware.org/features/01/03/06/179255.shtml

Hope they're of interest.  In summary...

ALSA is a much better designed system that promotes better programming
practices and more standardisation of features across the various sound
card drivers.  It has also allowed a lot of new applications to be built
on top of it that would have otherwise been very difficult / impossible
to create with OSS (due to the feature fragmentation across drivers).

In other words, it is a bit like a Free DirectX for sound -- remember
how DirectX was billed when it was launched: a way to standardise
graphics APIs and provide automatic support for all cards that had
DirectX drivers.  Quite a good idea.

With ALSA you can have multiple sound sources open at the same time (so
you can play music whilst gaming, for example).  I don't think this was
do-able under OSS (probably it was very driver-dependant).

I think that if you're happy with what you've got there is no immediate
need to upgrade (I hear that the OSS SBLive drivers are very good,
anyway).  But when you move to 2.6 I am sure you'll be at least as happy
with ALSA as you are with OSS now.

Hope that helps!

bye just now,


-- 
Matthew T. Atkinson <matthew at agrip.org.uk>