13 Jun
2005
13 Jun
'05
10:37 p.m.
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.
man, never forget that you live surrrounded quite literally by tens
of millions of people. your early success is just the beginning.
not everyone writes code as functional as you do. yet. your work
pushes the edge.
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).
indeed, such a space for app writers does exist. in fact if i could
fault linux/OSS hackers for one fault, it would be for their
infallible belief that once their code is done and running, nothing
else matters.
software mixing was something (for example) that in
retrospect clearly
should have been on the table from day one.
volume of a sound-source is but -one- parameter. what i find ironic
about the whole "MIDI API" versus "MIDI API" slant is the fact that,
whatever the API, the lessons of GM (general midi) are gladly ignored
for 'new-fangled science'. ;)
simple mixer interfaces, ditto.
16,000 or so, values, in MIDI ... for Volume at least, as a parameter.
asound.conf .... something required, god knows what :)
bah. this is, in my opinion, bloat. pure and simple.
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.
right, on this point, i agree wholeheartedly, and i comple and ally
with anyone who has it running. but: never ignore the fact you are
unique for getting an ALSA setup worth ignoring and just working with
..
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.
well, leave your navel alone and pay attention to some atrophy-earning arena's.
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.
what works, persists. same with steam engines, same with software.
--
;
Jay Vaughan