[linux-audio-dev] Juce now has ALSA support!

[Lee Revell]

On Wed, 2006-03-01 at 19:45 +0100, Pedro Lopez-Cabanillas wrote:
> On Wednesday 01 March 2006 12:51, Julian Storer wrote:
> > James Courtier-Dutton wrote:
> > > "default" means just that. use the name "default" instead of
> > > plughw:.... or hw:0,0
> [...]
> >
> > Ok, at the risk of "spreading the myth" that the ALSA documentation is
> > bad... is this stuff actually explained anywhere?? It took me a day of
> > googling just to find out what the two numbers after "hw" meant! I never
> > saw anything mention "default" or "plug:front", etc.
> 
> http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/alsa-lib/pcm.html#pcm_dev_names

Actually I think Julian has a point - I can't find the doc anywhere that
says you output to the front speakers by opening the "front" device and
rear the "rear" device, that apps should open the "default" PCM by
default, that "hw:x" should only be used for special cases where direct
hardware access is requires (like JACK), etc.  We seem to just assume
that people will ask on the mailing list, or look at how another app
does it.

All the docs I can find are targeted at someone who already knows how
ALSA works but needs more detail, so most people end up thinking it's
WAY more complicated just to get ALSA to produce sound than it is.
There's plenty of docs at the advanced developer level but not much
below that.

Just as it would be pointless to improve the Xlib docs now that GTK+ and
QT are available, I don't see this being fixed anytime soon, because we
should be steering people towards higher level APIs anyway, and these
are quite solid.

Maybe we just need an ALSA mini HOWTO.

Lee