[linux-audio-dev] Linux VERSUS OSS ???

[Frank Barknecht]

Hallo,
Paul Davis hat gesagt: // Paul Davis wrote:

> >Yes, thats true, you might read Josh's comments about writing the ALSA
> >part, he surely had a good time.
> 
> well i have some idea of that, since JACK has to do basically the same
> thing. 
> 
> >ALSA is not really easy to program, and thats not about novice programmers
> >and advanced programmers. There are just some people who do not understand
> >why a Sound API has to be that complicated. (JACK shows that it hasn't to
> >be this way)
> 

> if you look back over the last 2 years of alsa-devel, you will see why
> ALSA is so complex.

What might be needed is a kind of "Good Practice Advice" document for
application developers that use ALSA. I know, you will say that good
practice would be to use Jack or PortAudio :), but still there are
lots of apps that want to use ALSA but fail at simple things. On of
the worst Bad Practices seems to be hard-coded audio device names or
enumerating soundcards. For example mplayer only allows one to specify
hw:0, hw:1 and so on but doesn't do correct format conversions. This
seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of how ALSA and its
plug-PCM system works. I guess developers write their software this
way, because all the complexity of ALSA overshadows some main points.

ciao
-- 
 Frank Barknecht                               _ ______footils.org__