On 1/10/07, Jussi Laako <jussi.laako@pp.inet.fi> wrote:
Paul Davis wrote:
> welcome to winmodem for audio ...
Well, in this particular case, let's just see what the generic user out
there probably has. In quite a lot of cases it's some SoundBlaster
Audigy2 or X-Fi variant which both have somewhat extensive signal
Well, not everyone. But given that the desktop station as to sell new/better products, I would say this is still a marketing argument for any vendor. But for the laptop (and most of the developers, who run laptops and don't have money, and don't care too much), they probably have a very limited chip that does not do hw mixing.
And what about HDA? Every laptop will soon support HDA. Does it means we will have more hw mixing? As I said, it seems to be a marketing argument for these technologies.
Currently the thing we really are missing on Linux is HAL support for
something like OpenAL w/ EFX (or some DirectSound3D-for-Linux type
thing). Having this is somewhat crucial for game development. This is
also something OpenSL ES (
http://www.khronos.org/opensles/) is trying to
address on embedded area.
I feel the same, even if I would not criticize ALSA, which does "its-job". But the initial question sounded more like a gentle request for current status/state of art in linux audio. No offense here :)
Good luck to the next Allegro Audio API - that is an excellent initiative (btw, you should consider a wrapper on top of PortAudio, i would suggest).