ALSA [Was: Paris summit]

[Lee Revell]

On Fri, 2006-06-23 at 10:19 -0400, Shawn McMahon wrote:
> And I still dispute a) that Linux is the entire open source world and
> that

Sorry, I misspoke.  I meant to say "the Linux world"

>  b) every Linux application with an open license uses ALSA.
> Further, some Linux applications with open licenses don't use ALSA very
> well; Cedega is open source and on my Ubuntu Dapper amd64 box it uses
> OSS and can't work with ALSA.
> 

Most of them do, and more apps are adding it all the time.  I don't
dispute that the OSS support is many apps is better than the ALSA
support - the code has been around a lot longer and is better tested.

Anyway I didn't intend to make political statements but technical ones -
OSS is not a good choice of sound API, because you lose many features
provided by ALSA like software mixing of multiple streams and volume
control.  Lots of hardware these days does not have hw volume control,
so /dev/dsp apps will only be able to play at 100% volume - the volume
control is provided by alsa-lib.

Lee