17 May
2006
17 May
'06
9:51 p.m.
On Wed, 2006-05-17 at 18:30 -0500, Gain Paolo Mureddu wrote:
Well, you can still get a hardware mixing SBLive! for $10 or Audigy 2
Value for $30 IIRC...
Lee
Lee Revell escribió:
IMHO Linux and OSX are the only relevant Unices today. I can't believe
that Skype would cripple the Linux version just to run on FreeBSD or
Solaris if they knew what they were doing... I suspect they were simply
not aware that the in-kernel OSS emulation lacks so many features
compared with native ALSA. Or maybe they assumed that it was something
that could be fixed eventually (which is impossible as ALSA implements
mixing, routing, volume control, SRC, etc in userspace).
Yep, it sucks. The impossibility of making
in-kernel OSS emulation with
the advanced features of ALSA is probably the #1 unresolved sound issue
afflicting the Linux desktop. The only solution I see is to get these
apps fixed. Skype and Macromedia (flash plugin) have been promising
native ALSA support for some time now - maybe that will happen
someday ;-). We should try to educate closed source vendors that OSS is
not a reasonable option.
You could help by trying to figure out why these apps won't work with
aoss - there are a few open ALSA bug reports with lots of info already.
I also realize that having a drive agnostic system like GStreamer is a
good thing too (sort of like a HAL for multimedia apps), as GStreamer
would communicate with the driver which would do soft mix via dmix and
it would also be completely compatible with other Unix systems like
*BSD, regardless if they use OSS for their sound drivers (as 4Front OSS
is still the main driver supplier for pretty much all of the other Unix
systems) , this seems like a good idea especially for media
players, but
for other applications that require more direct access, having an ALSA
compatible output would be best (like Skype, games, TeamSpeak, etc)
True, but then you get into sound server dependencies, Gnome vs KDE
issues, etc. ALSA is the one option that's guaranteed to work on any
modern Linux distro.
I don't
think anyone has designed a new hardware mixing device in years.
It's all single-access with software mixing these days because it makes
the hardware cheaper. The Envy stuff will never support hardware mixing
because it works on Windows without it ;-)
Lee
I kind of figured that much (the Envy24 arch not having a hardware
mixing DSP), just needed to be sure about that. Indeed hardware mixing
cards are quite expensive, as still today an Audgy 2 ZS sells for nearly
as much as an X-Fi Extreme Music edition (about $160 USD) down here.