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

[Christoph Eckert]

> please describe in detail what you
> think a user friendly interface would look like.

There are several issues at different points:

* alsaconf has done a really great job in the past, but meanwhile I see 
the need for a replacement which can handle more than one card, support 
USB (and in the future firewire) devices, can read an existing 
configuration, set a certain device as the default device and so on. 
Based on such a new script, we then could build even GUI configuration 
frontends (Qt, Gtk, KDE, you name it)

* ALSA aware applications need to offer the possibility to choose the 
card to use. Many users have more than one device these days, a cheap 
AC '97 one and a cool 7.1 USB device. When playing a video file, there 
should be a possibility to tell the player which device to use. On tour 
with my notebook I prefer to output audio of a DVD mixed as stereo on 
my internal speakers while at home or at a friend's I'll better use my 
USB device

* Applications should remember the last used device (not to mention 
soundservers here) so the user gets a straightforward experience ("I 
once set it up and since then it simply works(TM)")

* Users need a simple GUI to set the default (=most often used) device, 
maybe renaming the cards, configuring special options easily (asoundrc 
resp. special options in modules.conf like card ordering)

* ALSA runs a driver based on the chipset found. Unfortunately, and I 
mainly have those AC '97 chips in mind, these have a huge set of 
features a user never needs or even worse which are not available on 
the chassis. But ALSA cannot know that because it only knows the chip. 
Furthermore ALSA builds a generic mixer interface for the chip. That's 
a really cool piece of software, but have you ever tried on a notebook 
with an AC '97 chipset to set up your card for VOIP properly? An 
average user will be lost. Therefore I had the idea to put an 
additional layer between ALSA and the mixer interface so users can 
contribute mixer descriptions for wide spread cards. If such an 
desription doesn't exist, ALSA could still fall back to the generic 
mixer interface


Just my two Cents.


Best regards


ce