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

[Andy Wingo]

Hi,

On Wed, 2006-03-01 at 17:04 -0500, Lee Revell wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-03-01 at 22:48 +0100, Christoph Eckert wrote:
> > * 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)
> 
> Much of this is already done - Gnome provides both a GUI and CLI
> interface to set the default soundcard, System->Preferences->Sound.

(That still mentions ESD, but we all have our closet-skeletons eh.)

I wanted to write in to mention this bug report,
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=329106:

        It's currently not possible to specify one specific ALSA device
        in a pipeline such that the same pipeline is guaranteed to work
        across machine reboots. The problem is that ALSA card numbers
        are generated on each system startup. The result depends on the
        random order of which kernel module gets loaded first. When
        hotplugging USB audio devices, the card number changes may even
        happen without machine reboots.
        
        I propose to use HAL's UDI (Unique Device Id) as persistent ALSA
        sound device identifier. A patch to make HAL's UDI independent of
        ALSA's card number has already been committed to HAL CVS HEAD.

So, using HAL is a way to reliably choose a particular harware device;
arguably ALSA should handle this case itself though.

Regards,
-- 
Andy Wingo
http://wingolog.org/