[LAD] ALSA frustration

For the N-th time I've set aside a day to try and read some of the ALSA documentation. For the N-th time I've completely lost my way in a web consisting of * The complete lack of any documentation that explains the concepts, the big picture, and the terminology. * Completely useless docs, of the form: function xxx_set_yyy (parm_zzz) sets the yyy of xxx to zzz. or similar, in other words something generated automagically and completely uninformative and redundant. In particalur if it's impossible to find out what yyy is supposed to be or do in the first place. * Uncomprehensible English. * When trying to learn something from actual source code or examples, layer upon layer of syntactic sugar making it virtually impossible to understand what's going on. All this more than ten years after ALSA was announced. I *do* understand those hardware manufactureres who just refuse to try and write an ALSA driver. In this case my very humble endeavour was just to find out if or not it would be possible to create something similar to the alsa_jack plugin that would actually present itself as a sound card, so that (badly written) apps would be prepared to use it. If someone knows the answer to that question and can also explain it I'll commend him/her in my prayers. -- FA A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be an utopia. It's also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities. (Cory Doctorow)