[LAD] ALSA doumentation

[Fred Gleason]

On Thursday 13 November 2008 07:08:19 pm Fons Adriaensen wrote:
> Is there, after X years of ALSA, any documentation that
> explains the basic concepts and tells me how to do this ?
> If such a thing exists I can't find it.
>
> The Doxygen info on the ALSA site is completely useless
> for the purpose of learning to understand and use the
> control interface.

I feel your pain, Fons.  I myself have been looking for such a thing for 6+ 
years, wholly unsuccessfully.  I think that this single issue is the major 
reason for the continued survival and, indeed, thriving of the old OSS API.  
For all it's shortcomings, it does provide a reliable, relatively compact 
and, above all, well-documented path to getting sound into and out of a Linux 
box.  ALSA OTOH seems to me to be designed to be *anti*-compact, and when 
added to the dearth of usable documentation makes for an all-but-unusable 
system.


> What these things actually mean, how they fit together
> and what is the big picture is AFAIK nowhere and never
> explained.

Yes, it has always struck me as odd how the ALSA Project trumpets 
it's 'Advanced' nature in the title, while providing no coherent explanation 
anywhere as to how or why it merits that title.  Even a page or two of 
*philosophy* -- the design goals, the guiding principles of the design -- 
would be worth more than the totality of all the useless recitations of the 
obvious in the Doxygen docs.

Cheers!


|-------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Frederick F. Gleason, Jr. |               Chief Developer               |
|                           |               Paravel Systems               |
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| ... But if we laugh with derision, we will never understand.  Human     |
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| we can tell.  If intelligent people invested intense energy in issues   |
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