ALSA [Was: Paris summit]

[James "Doc" Livingston]

On Thu, 2006-06-22 at 11:39 -0400, Lee Revell wrote:
> I'm sorry, I just don't buy it.  The entire open source world uses ALSA
> - why can't the proprietary guys use it too?

If by "entire open source world" you mean Linux. ALSA is Linux-specific
(it's what the L stands for), and OSS works on other *nix operating
systems like the BSDs.


> On Thu, 2006-06-22 at 09:08 +0200, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> > There are a lot of great reasons to use a good software mixing daemon
> > instead of ALSA's dmix mess.
> > 
> 
> How is it a mess?  What's wrong with it?  What reasons?

* ESD is network transparent
* dmix causes the first sound-using app to fork, and have a duplicate
process
* ESD runs completely in user-space
* ALSA is Linux-specific (above)

and probably other things.


> You still haven't explained exactly what's wrong with ALSA on a
> technical level.  All I've seen so far is "I don't like it".

ESD sucks in many ways, and ALSA+dmix is better in a lot of respects.
But that doesn't mean ALSA+dmix is better in every way (it's not), and
it doesn't mean that other things couldn't be better than ALSA.


Cheers,

James "Doc" Livingston
-- 
"Never be afraid to tell the world who you are." -- Anonymous