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

[Ronald S. Bultje]

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.
Ubuntu, and other distros, provide details for sound hardware where,
depending on the hardware type, dmix or the device (if it can mix) are
chosen as "default" output. Mixing is no longer an issue. I don't get
skips like in the pre-1.0 alsa versions anymore. The issue is fixed. Maybe
it isn't portable to non-Linux systems (yet), but I can't imagine that
organizations such as OSDL would care the least.

What use case is jack ("pro audio"? - come on, it's all or nothing) or
pulseaudio ("the non-linux desktop unix/gnome user"?) trying to address?
You guys seem to be fighting a war that is not going on. I don't
understand why RedHat would hire someone to ununbreak this and introduce a
new audio sound server. If networking is really the only thing, then
please just get off your asses and introduce something for that in ALSA so
we can all sleap peacefully and hack on relevant things. It's not worth
doing the fight again.

Ronald