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

[Kjetil S. Matheussen]

Lennart Poettering:
>
> On Thu, 17.12.09 13:52, Kjetil S. Matheussen (k.s.matheussen at notam02.no) wrote:
>
>> Mixing works just fine, even when using ASIO. Maybe you have to start
>> the asio program first though, I don't know. But still, there's no
>> reason why you shouldn't have a global option, lets say 256 frames
>> 48000Hz, that everything mixes down to, and then software which needs
>> hardcore low-level performance must obey to that setting.
>
> Uh, that's a great way to burn your battery.
>
> If you care about more than pro audio, then you want to dynamically
> adjust the sleep times based on the requirements of the clients
> connected. That means you cannot use fixed sized hardware fragments
> anymore, but need to schedule audio more dynamically using system
> timers.
>
> This in fact is where most of the complexity in systems such as
> PulseAudio stems from.
>

Okay, I didn't know that. But this is still no reason
why ALSA shouldn't take care of mixing/scheduling/etc.
by itself plus providing low-latency performance
(with mixing) when that is required. Leaving out
mixing to third-parties, plus exposing a very
complicated low-level API and a complicated
plugin/configuration system (which probably
has taken a more time to develop than implementing
a proper mixing engine), has created lots of chaos.