well i have some idea of that, since JACK has to do basically the same thing. ALSA is, at this time, a hardware abstraction layer. it attempts to provide mechanisms for applications to interact with all the many capabilities of modern audio interfaces. it doesn't provide any highly simplified model for this - on alsa-devel and here and on jackit-devel, we argued quite a bit about whether or not ALSA should provide something like JACK. i continue to think that it should not. JACK, and any other very simple audio API, is all about removing most of the possibilities associated with audio interface hardware. this involves many design decisions that may not be appropriate for some kinds of applications. as such, i am happy that we have JACK *and* ALSA, with JACK providing a powerful but highly simplified API and ALSA offering full access to the audio hardware for programs that need it. all that we need now (planned for release 1.1) is for an app to become the JACK server when its the only thing running, thus removing the *requirement* to have a server/client model. if you look back over the last 2 years of alsa-devel, you will see why ALSA is so complex. we have wanted to provide control over every possible aspect of what you can do. interleave/non-interleave, mixer controls, 24 bits in the lower or upper end of a 32 bit value, generic S/PDIF controls, control of the sample clock source, driver side parameters, xrun detection, on and on it goes. most of us don't want or need such an API, but some of us do, sometimes at least. the discussion only happens, IMHO, because ALSA has taken so long and gone through so many API-incompatible changes. as a result, we still have lots of OSS-API using software around which might have been recoded 2 years ago under different circumstances. if ALSA had been ready with the 0.5 series, i don't think we'd be talking about this...

Hallo, Frank Barknecht hat gesagt: // Frank Barknecht wrote: I learned that this is wrong: mplayer does allow device selection by name. Sorry for this. ciao -- Frank Barknecht _ ______footils.org__