[linux-audio-user] Documentation: (was: recording multiple input audio streams )

cliffw at easystreet.com cliffw at easystreet.com
Wed Jun 25 02:03:01 EDT 2003


Small subject alteration.
Paul Perkins said:

> Well, the WIKI page on ALSA config files at 
> 	
> 	http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php?page=.asoundrc
> 
> has evolved to where it is beginning to sound useful. But it doesn't take you 
> all that far, and it needs explanations of basic terms like "pcm" (in its 
> peculiar ALSA meaning), "slave", and "plugin". The "detailed" material on 
> plugins it references 
> (http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/alsa-lib/pcm_plugins.html) is just a 
> list of plugin names and plugin argument names, padded with some boiler-plate 
> text that rarely adds anything that isn't implicit in the names.
> 
I have to say, this has been an issue for me also. Things have improved muchly
in the last year, but there still is a way to go. There's a lot of translation
needed between Those-Who-Read-The-Source and Those-Who-But-Point-n-Click. 

I'd like to contribute to the documentation. 
One thing i've been bothered by. (Maybe this doesn't bother LISP hackers, i 
dunno)
Not enough example .asoundrc files. The few I find are always useful to me, 
but i can't find very many. Maybe people don't want to pollute the list, maybe 
everybody
else is smarter than me, who knows.

I'll make an offer: Mail me (cliffw at easystreet.com) your .asoundrc file + name 
of hardware.
If you have a quick example of What It Does For You, email me that too. 
I'll attempt to boil off the excess and add something useful to the wiki. 
cliffw


> I don't measure the power of a computer or of software by what it can do. I 
> measure power by how much faster or better I can do what I want to do with 
> the computer or software, than without it. Including the learning time. By 
> this definition, good documentation makes software more powerful, and 
> documentation that requires a lot of hunting around and trial-and-error to 
> make sense of, makes software less powerful.
> 
> As for how far I am willing to go, that depends on what I expect to find when 
> I get there. I'm a pretty good C and Python programmer with a smattering of 
> C++ and Java, I'll edit fstab, modules.conf, XF86Config, and so on with vi 
> when I have to (but these days count it as a bug in the distribution when I 
> do have to). I use Linux for pretty much all my computer activities these 
> days, except music recording / synthesizing / effects / mixing. I'd like to 
> use Linux for that as well, but it just doesn't seem to be ready yet. When 
> Ardour is stable it might be time for me to make another attempt to switch 
> over (from the evil empire os). Music is enough of a challenge for me, I 
> don't need to be on the software bleeding edge at the same time.
> 
> On Sunday 22 June 2003 11:55 pm, Patrick Shirkey wrote:
> > Paul Perkins wrote:
> > > On Friday 20 June 2003 01:30 pm, Patrick Shirkey wrote:
> > >>Paul Perkins wrote:
> > >>>... and I'm still waiting for the day when someone explains ALSA
> > >>>configuration files
> > >>>in a way that I can understand....
> > > What don't I understand? I would like to see each concept that the ALSA
> > > configuration file language is intended to be able to express, and then
> > > the syntax used to express that concept. Then some examples with clear
> > > explanations of why each thing in the config file was put there. As in a
> > > good programming language tutorial. What I've seen instead is a lot of
> > > chunks of strange-looking syntax "explained" by saying "try stuffing this
> > > in <some file somewhere>, and good luck." Which leaves me blundering
> > > around in the dark, hoping to get lucky :-).
> ...
> >  "Don't bend the
> > spoon... Let the spoon bend you..."
> 
> Maybe if I had any idea what you mean by "let the spoon bend you" I would also 
> find the ALSA documentation crystal clear ;-).
> 
> Paul Perkins
> sigmotto: Liberty is theft.
> 
> 
> 
> 





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