Re: [LAU] So what do you think sucks about Linux audio ?

Disclaimer: I'm kind of out of the loop these days, only doing some minor audio and music for my own games, using a custom engine. (http://audiality.org - formerly known as ChipSound) I still work primarily on Linux, and I use/support JACK, even in the games themselves. Also, I'm on Gentoo (a rebuilt ex-Sabayon system), so not using a dedicated audio distro. Not particularly concerned with plugin APIs either at this point. A2 has its own unit API for the modular voices, but I'd consider that internal, since this all runs "live" inside the games (can't use GPLed plugins!), it's tightly integrated with the engine for performance reasons - and it's all integer/fixed point. (I already had most of that integer DSP code, and there are still potential target platforms with crappy on nonexistent FP support...) Either way, I have two main issues at this point: 1) Horrible latency with other APIs when using JACK. I'm running a stack of ALSA emulation - PulseAudio - JACK - ALSA. It "works," but I get ridiculous latencies (a second or more) with applications using ALSA, and some applications just crash. Unfortunately, SDL doesn't support PA nor JACK natively - so, I gave up on that and just added a JACK driver to my sound engine instead. (Yep, the next release of Kobo II will support JACK where available.) I suspect it might be possible to improve the latency with the ALSA emu/PA setup, but I haven't messed with it further. It was quite enough of a PITA to get it to work at all... 2) Still haven't found a basic, solid MIDI sequencer. I'll have another go at it one of these days, but my experiences so far: countless dependencies on cutting edge libraries, crashes, lots and lots of features I don't need, and missing features that I absolutely do need. I'm tempted to just go back to running some old Cakewalk version on a Windoze box again... All I really need is a plain, not overly cumbersome MIDI sequencer with piano roll, event list and a few basic edit operations like cut/paste, quantize, velocity scale, transpose etc. No audio, no plugins, no session management, no nothing! Oh, except for that sustain pedal CC - I'm actually using that sometimes! ;-) -- //David Olofson - Consultant, Developer, Artist, Open Source Advocate .--- Games, examples, libraries, scripting, sound, music, graphics ---. | http://consulting.olofson.net http://olofsonarcade.com | '---------------------------------------------------------------------'