[LAU] perhaps why some of us have more trouble w/ pulseaudio than others (ICE1712/M-audio delta problem w/ pulseaudio)

[Hartmut Noack]

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Am 10.05.2010 03:00, schrieb Fernando Lopez-Lezcano:
> On Sat, 2010-05-08 at 18:23 -0400, Paul Davis wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>         Now that would be shocking I'd say. Since Suse 8.0 the ICE1712
>>         was
>>         always the most reliable chipset one could possibly find for
>>         Linux. So
>>         that would be a major regression and should be a show-stopper
>>         for alsa.
>>         
>>         BUT: the link points to a bug that affects puls audio and it
>>         affects it
>>         with a EWS88MT wich is one of the not-so typical ICE1712-cards
>>         like the
>>         EWX or the MAudio Audiophile and Delta-Series.
>>         
>>         So how about these cards and alsa/jack? Any trouble out there
>>         with
>>         bleeding-edge distros?
>>         
>>
>> my reading of this (and the related ALSA bug report) is that this is a
>> Pulse-only bug, because its related to Pulse's attempt to provide a
>> mapping of whatever-it-is-that-the-hw-provides into
>> standard-things-that-users-can-know-and-love.
>>
>> JACK will just use the channels as single, undifferentiated channels
>> and doesn't care about their names, function,etc. etc.
>>
>> i could be wrong in my assessment.
> 
> I think you are correct. Pulse points to alsa as the culprit, alsa
> ignores the issue, it may _not_ be an issue for alsa, I don't know.


I agree with Paul. This is a problem with PA, alsa works as expected and
perfectly OK with the envy24-chipset.
Even if one likes to call it a "bug" that alsa presents all envy24-cards
more or less the same though they are physically quiet different, I
would call this a minor flaw since technically there is nothing broken here.

Reading the thread on the PA-site I feel a bit uneasy. Lennart demands
alsa to report a "front"-device wich is nonsense since AFAIK only the
terratec 5.1 uses the envy24-chipset to produce a set of outputs for
surround-speakers. All others are cards for musicians delivering 2+2,
4+2 ore more analogue/digital i/o ports that are all considered the
same, delivering a pristine hifi-signal that the user is invited to send
whatever source he/she likes to send to.

What will PA do with a Delta 10x10? Trying to send "front" to the first
2, "rear" to the next 2, a lowpassed "sub" to the fith and then what?

Why cant PA just offer a stereo-out for the first 2 ports of the envy
and secondary stereo-outs for the rest plus a digital-out for the
spdif-ports on these cards? Do they consider users, that spend quite
some money on such a card, too stupid to find out, why the secondary
stereo-outs do not deliver a signal with a MAudio audiophile?
And NO! I would NOT consider it a progress, if alsa would start to tell
me, that the first two ports of my MAudio would be "front-speaker-outs"
for they are not.

This musing about "broken" alsa-drivers that need to be "fixed" in the
thread at PA increases the bad feeling about PA's relation and awarenes
to pro-audio.

best regs
HZN

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