[gst-devel] Linux audio is a mess? [was: JACK and GStreamer, from the horse's mouth]

[Thomas Vander Stichele]

On Wed, 2006-11-29 at 14:49 +0100, Ronald S. Bultje wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Wed, 29 Nov 2006, Lennart Poetering wrote:
> > maybe we should try to get all interested people together at a more,
> > ...humm... popular conference such as linux.conf.au 2007. Or perhaps someone
> > should organize as seperate "The grand cleanup-the-linux-audio-jumble
> > summit".
> 
> You guys are making far too big a problem out of this.
> 
> It's fixed. The solution is ALSA. ALSA handles devices and sound servers
> through dmix. The API is apparently push-based, since that's what their
> API docs say. You don't like dmix? Fix it. You don't like the push-model?
> Sucks. But nothing you can do about it.

ALSA and dmix have been around for a long time now and still it has
various bugs that make it unusable on a lot machines for day-to-day use.
I am happy that your particular driver seems to work fine for you.  It
still does not work fine for me on two of my machines.  The hangs are
less frequent these days, the left-ear-only-distortion is still subtly
there though.

I am surprised that after all these years ALSA still has a lot of issues
and it's probably not going to go away until some distro people actually
put a guy in charge whose job it is to fix it on all hardware and
drivers in use.  I know, not an easy task.


I am also hoping for a day where some legacy applications can easily be
run integrated with ALSA.  It is fine to handwave and say "nobody should
use OSS anymore".  It's a little less fine to pretend that the
handwaving actually solves the problem correctly-.

Thomas