[linux-audio-dev] What parts of Linux audio simply suck ?

Paul Davis paul at linuxaudiosystems.com
Wed Jun 22 02:40:04 UTC 2005


>On Tue, 2005-06-21 at 12:27 -0400, Lee Revell wrote:
>
>> What in the hell are these newbies doing that they need to edit their
>> asound.conf?  It should just work.  I have never had to touch one...
>
>One good example is Delta1010. If you want to have all the 10 channels
>divided to devices; 4 analog stereo pairs + s/pdif. M-Audio's Win driver
>does the same thing.
>
>Currently OSS can provide meaningful mapping out-of-box. Of course you
>can still access the whole bunch at once if you like.
>
>ALSA just presents 12 input channels and 10 output channels. In this
>setup it's a bit hard to get XMMS to play to S/PDIF (the last 2
>channels). Took me some time to figure this out as this was not
>documented, not at least at that time (2-3 years ago). I still don't
>know how to map that S/PDIF output to ALSA's OSS emulation /dev/dsp9
>where I have it on native OSS.

although i broadly agree with these observations, it depends a little
on what you think a "newbie" is going to do with a 1010.

admittedly, the OSS situation is probably the best, although last time
i looked i had the impression that you could open /dev/dsp in any
particular configuration, but not multiple times. correct me if am
wrong.

more generally though, just what is the sensible default config for a
multichannel card? its possible but a little far-fetched to suggest
that its to be used as N stereo devices. the people buying 12 channel
cards are doing it for a reason, and running it as 6 or 5 or 12 SB's
is not the most likely one.

this makes it hard to decide what the correct configuration is. i am
think that on OS X, you get all channels by default and cannot choose
otherwise. this is certainly true for the RME drivers (which cannot be
used as stereo devices, although CoreAudio apps can play stereo
streams through them).

--p



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