[LAD] Anyone have experience with OSS (3 or 4)?

[Victor Lazzarini]

It's also true to say that elsewhere, on Windows, if you want to have  
low-latency, you also loose the software mixer. AFAIK ASIO drivers and  
KS implementations are single-client like alsa.

To me, it makes perfect sense to have alsa as a HAL, and get people  
using pulseaudio or jack at application level.

Victor
On 17 Dec 2009, at 12:29, Paul Davis wrote:

> On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 6:47 AM, Kjetil S. Matheussen
> <k.s.matheussen at notam02.no> wrote:
>> No. Not providing mixing for all devices is a design fault
>> in alsa. I'm going to install OSS as soon as I get time.
>
> Kjetil, although you're absolutely welcome to your own opinions on
> this, I would note two things:
>
>  1) ALSA has long provided "dmix" user space mixing without a server.
> Its a very, very clever
>      solution that is, unfortunately, so clever that it often doesn't
> work  for the most demanding
>      situations. For normal desktop use, it has always worked well.
> However, as well as it works
>      simply goes to emphasize all the desirable details of a desktop
> sound system that dmix
>      by itself does not provide: per-app volume control, easy device
> switching, and more. As
>      a result ...
>
>   2) many people would say that its not ALSA's job to provide this
> kind of functionality but
>       instead to act as a kind of HAL for audio. The job of mixing
> should (and can) be done
>       by a user-space implementation (PulseAudio or JACK depending on
> your workflow
>       needs), and ALSA can simply be "the device drivers". This is
> certainly how the
>       audio ecosystem is shaping up on Linux now, particularly with
> the increasing
>       emphasis among those paying for system development because  
> their work
>       generally involves low power mobile devices where the desktop
> issues are absent.
>
> --p
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