[linux-audio-dev] Best-performing Linux-friendly MIDI interfaces?

[Alfons Adriaensen]

On Mon, Jun 13, 2005 at 11:22:57AM -0400, Paul Davis wrote:

> ALSA's biggest problem was that people like me shaped its design too
> much. I was trying to ensure that ALSA was useful for pro-audio setups,
> and I had little interest in the desktop story. There were no
> (sufficiently) vigorous advocates for that world as ALSA developed, and
> we are seeing the cost of that now.

And the benefits, of course.

Actually, I find it difficult to find anything in ALSA to confirm the idea
that the requirements from the pro-audio users have had a negative impact
on the system as a whole. 

For professional use, you probably want to get as close as possible to
the original data with nothing in between (i.e. the hw: devices).

Now the main problem I see with ALSA for the 'desktop' users are in 
the control interfaces. Maybe the idea of the driver providing a 
sort of description of the card (e.g. a list of control elements)
and having this info interpreted by a generic mixer application was
not the best one. It works in some cases, but breaks down easily
when a card has different 'modes', in particular for surround.
For example it seems to be quite difficult to get a single volume
control for all channels in a 5.1 setup, something a desktop audio
user would take for granted.

-- 
FA