14 Jun
2005
14 Jun
'05
1:50 p.m.
Also, he seems to be pissed because he bought one of
the new "SBLives"
that uses the snd-ca0106 driver, and expects to get hardware mixing like
a real SBLive. He's just an idiot, and his beef is with Creative, not
the ALSA people.
jwz isn't an idiot, and he doesn't expect h/w mixing. he knows the
difference between h/w and s/w mixing. his point is that from a desktop
perspective, linux in 2005 ought to just provide [hs]/w mixing as
required, with no intervention by the (desktop) user. he's not talking
about musicians, or other "creative acoustic types". he's right. what
jwz doesn't understand is the limited hw vendor support audio devices
get (chipsets changing subtly at random times, undocumented pinouts,
lack of adherence to ac97 or other standards). he also doesn't
understand how few people produced ALSA. and most of all he doesn't
realize the design tradeoffs between the various audio APIs. he's the
guy who would have been very happy with the windows kernel mixer-based
audio API, and would have known absolutely nothing about why people
needed ASIO, GSIF etc.
but more broadly, windows is not the gold standard here, OS X is, and
the truth is that apple have designed a much better system from day one.
on OS X, things do work more or less the way jwz and many other people
think they should. JACK gets close, and in a few ways (inter-app
connectivity) betters CoreAudio, but it is not a general purpose audio
API and there are no whipmasters to force mplayer, skype, and rest of
the desktop app developers to use it.
--p