What Parts of Linux Audio Simply Work Great? (was Re: [linux-audio-dev] Best-performing Linux-friendly MIDI interfaces?)

[Jay Vaughan]

>he [jwz] also doesn't understand how few people produced ALSA.

i dunno, i don't want to speak for jwz, but i'm pretty sure he's 
aware just how a few people can get a very great thing done.  you may 
say he's seasoned at it, in fact, and knows the pitfalls 'the mob' go 
through in order to get themselves organized and avoid stagnancy .. 
at least, as a reader of his frequent rants for the past 15 years now 
on the topic of OSS/software development, thats the sense i get.

>but more broadly, windows is not the gold standard here, OS X is, and
>the truth is that apple have designed a much better system from day one.

i would like to point out that both ALSA and CoreAudio have similar 
lifecycles, too.  i mean, i don't think CoreAudio got a lot of its 
heritage from the NextStep days (though NS had bitchin' audio from 
the beginning, also), but there is a great deal to be thought about 
in comparing the two approaches.


>on OS X, things do work more or less the way jwz and many other people
>think they should. JACK gets close, and in a few ways (inter-app
>connectivity) betters CoreAudio, but it is not a general purpose audio
>API and there are no whipmasters to force mplayer, skype, and rest of
>the desktop app developers to use it.

i think a combination of:

a) a well-formed strategy to clean up the Linux mess, and
b) an [mplayer/skype] patch-fest to bring them in line with that 
strategy using actual source changes (where possible), and
c) far greater advocacy of the success of linux audio by its users 
and boot-CD makers ..

... would do the job.

oh, and i guess it wouldn't hurt to have a macmusic.org-like 
"linuxaudioapps.org" clone around, too, though i know there are 
already a few sites perilously qualified for this slot ..

-- 

;

Jay Vaughan