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

[Jan Schmidt]

On Wed, 2006-11-29 at 17:31 +0100, Ronald S. Bultje wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Wed, 29 Nov 2006, Paul Davis wrote:
> > The ALSA API supports push and pull models.
> [..]
> > dmix is very, very clever. that doesn't mean its necessarily the right
> > solution. the internals (kernel-side) of CoreAudio are another
> > interesting approach to the same problem.
> 
> So, then could anyone explain to me how using jack or pulseaudio instead
> of improving dmix to, for ex., be better in pull-environments would be
> good to my good friend Joe A. User? Imagine how many applications you
> suddenly don't have to adapt to support your cool new soundsystem, because
> - hey! - they all already support ALSA.

Well for that, I'd say: fortunately ALSA is pluggable, and for the main
part you can transparently redirect apps to whereever you like. 

At the moment, I'm running my entire desktop through pulseaudio with its
ALSA plugin by telling alsa apps to send their output the 'pcm.pulse'
device I have defined in /etc/asound.conf

J.

-- 
Jan Schmidt thaytan at noraisin.net

Open Source Software: Free as in Free Speech, not Free Beer