13 Jun
2005
13 Jun
'05
12:02 p.m.
On Mon, Jun 13, 2005 at 11:22:57AM -0400, Paul Davis wrote:
ALSA's biggest problem was that people like me
shaped its design too
much. I was trying to ensure that ALSA was useful for pro-audio setups,
and I had little interest in the desktop story. There were no
(sufficiently) vigorous advocates for that world as ALSA developed, and
we are seeing the cost of that now.
And the benefits, of course.
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.
For professional use, you probably want to get as close as possible to
the original data with nothing in between (i.e. the hw: devices).
Now the main problem I see with ALSA for the 'desktop' users are in
the control interfaces. Maybe the idea of the driver providing a
sort of description of the card (e.g. a list of control elements)
and having this info interpreted by a generic mixer application was
not the best one. It works in some cases, but breaks down easily
when a card has different 'modes', in particular for surround.
For example it seems to be quite difficult to get a single volume
control for all channels in a 5.1 setup, something a desktop audio
user would take for granted.
--
FA