7 Jan
2005
7 Jan
'05
7:05 p.m.
Hannu Savolainen wrote:
Maybe, but this was not my point. My point was that an organization with
weight. such as x.org (doesn't have to be x.org) could support a common
technology that all could support -- a technology solution to solve the
issues that have been illustrated in this thread. Maybe the
organization would be something like the AES.
As far as what technology to support, that would be up to the body
developing/recommending/supporting it. Maybe it's OSS, maybe it's ALSA,
maybe it's a combination. Maybe it's new.
The potential problem with this approach is that it may end up being
technology developed by committee. That rarely works very well (though,
sometimes it does surprisingly well.) My druthers is to have a cool
technology rise to the top by a couple of brillant people that gathers
grassroot enthusiasm. But, sometimes that just doesn't happen unless you
have someone, or something, giving it a poke in the ribs every once in a
while. The "poke-in-the-ribs" is best if it's cash. In the FOSS case,
it's for the love of the technology.
Perhaps
programmers of current low-level audio apps will feel that they
may lose control by approaching this organization. Then again, it might
significantly elevate the need of audio in the linux community by
utilizing the x.org organization as the vehicle to promote and develop a
Unified Audio Driver.
So the *x community should invent yet another audio driver API (in
addition to OSS and ALSA-driver). Isn't the situation already messy
enough?
At this moment all Unix vendors (other than official
Linux) are already
behind OSS. esd works on top of it. artsd works on top of it. Jack works
on top of it. All applications (other than few alsa-* ones) are compatible
with it. Even significant part of alsa-lib has been ported to work on top
of OSS (this work started just about a month ago). So is there anything
that is still missing from OSS?
The current draft of the OSS 4.0 *) specification is available in
http://www.fi.opensound.com/developer . If there is something important
missing? We can consider adding such features in the near future. Comments
are higly welcome.
*) The OSS version included in the Linux kernel as well as ALSA's OSS
emulation are based on OSS v3.8 which is almost 10 years old. For this
reason they lack all the new features we have implemented during past
years.
The obvious question is "why is ALSA, and the distros, not
utilizing/including the latest version of OSS?"
* Is it political?
* Is it because they don't need to -- i.e. all audio apps use v3.8 and
that's just fine, thank you very much.
* Is it because there is a technical issue with the latest OSS version?
Maybe the answers will uncover the issues.
brad