Actually, I find it difficult to find anything in ALSA
to confirm the idea
that the requirements from the pro-audio users have had a negative impact
on the system as a whole.
what i meant was that there has been dramatically insufficient attention
paid to the development of ALSA tools and/or APIs that provide the kind
of functionality that desktop users want. it has been put off and put
off as the other parts of ALSA have evolved, and now we have a really
very powerful and flexible system that is more or less unusable from a
control point of view (for desktop users).
software mixing was something (for example) that in retrospect clearly
should have been on the table from day one.
simple mixer interfaces, ditto.
asound.conf .... something required, god knows what :)
at the moment, if ALSA doesn't quite work for you, then its probably
going to be very hard (for a non-audio-geek) to make it work. of course,
if it does work, it generally works very well.
its not that jaroslav, takashi and others didn't know this - but the
manpower available was so low that these desktop-friendly issues took a
back seat. thats how it looks from here, anyway. and also, some of these
issues are hard. the debate over soundservers is indicative of just how
difficult it can be to get any kind of agreement on how to to solve even
a completely obvious problem.
--p