Re: [linux-audio-user] Documentation: (was: recording multiple input audio streams ) - Linux-audio-user

25 Jun 2003

Small subject alteration.
Paul Perkins said:

...
  Well, the WIKI page on ALSA config files at 

 	http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php?page=.asoundrc

 has evolved to where it is beginning to sound useful. But it doesn't take you 
 all that far, and it needs explanations of basic terms like "pcm" (in its 
 peculiar ALSA meaning), "slave", and "plugin". The
"detailed" material on 
 plugins it references 
 (http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/alsa-lib/pcm_plugins.html) is just a 
 list of plugin names and plugin argument names, padded with some boiler-plate 
 text that rarely adds anything that isn't implicit in the names.
  I have to say, this has been an issue for me also. Things have improved muchly
in the last year, but there still is a way to go. There's a lot of translation
needed between Those-Who-Read-The-Source and Those-Who-But-Point-n-Click. 

I'd like to contribute to the documentation. 
One thing i've been bothered by. (Maybe this doesn't bother LISP hackers, i 
dunno)
Not enough example .asoundrc files. The few I find are always useful to me, 
but i can't find very many. Maybe people don't want to pollute the list, maybe 
everybody
else is smarter than me, who knows.

I'll make an offer: Mail me (cliffw(a)easystreet.com) your .asoundrc file + name 
of hardware.
If you have a quick example of What It Does For You, email me that too. 
I'll attempt to boil off the excess and add something useful to the wiki. 
cliffw

...
  I don't measure the power of a computer or of
software by what it can do. I 
 measure power by how much faster or better I can do what I want to do with 
 the computer or software, than without it. Including the learning time. By 
 this definition, good documentation makes software more powerful, and 
 documentation that requires a lot of hunting around and trial-and-error to 
 make sense of, makes software less powerful.

 As for how far I am willing to go, that depends on what I expect to find when 
 I get there. I'm a pretty good C and Python programmer with a smattering of 
 C++ and Java, I'll edit fstab, modules.conf, XF86Config, and so on with vi 
 when I have to (but these days count it as a bug in the distribution when I 
 do have to). I use Linux for pretty much all my computer activities these 
 days, except music recording / synthesizing / effects / mixing. I'd like to 
 use Linux for that as well, but it just doesn't seem to be ready yet. When 
 Ardour is stable it might be time for me to make another attempt to switch 
 over (from the evil empire os). Music is enough of a challenge for me, I 
 don't need to be on the software bleeding edge at the same time.

 On Sunday 22 June 2003 11:55 pm, Patrick Shirkey wrote:
  Paul Perkins wrote:
 > On Friday 20 June 2003 01:30 pm, Patrick Shirkey wrote:
 >>Paul Perkins wrote:
 >>>... and I'm still waiting for the day when someone explains ALSA
 >>>configuration files
 >>>in a way that I can understand....
 > What don't I understand? I would like to see each concept that the ALSA
 > configuration file language is intended to be able to express, and then
 > the syntax used to express that concept. Then some examples with clear
 > explanations of why each thing in the config file was put there. As in a
 > good programming language tutorial. What I've seen instead is a lot of
 > chunks of strange-looking syntax "explained" by saying "try stuffing
this
 > in <some file somewhere>, and good luck." Which leaves me blundering
 > around in the dark, hoping to get lucky :-).  ...
   "Don't bend the
 spoon... Let the spoon bend you..."  
 Maybe if I had any idea what you mean by "let the spoon bend you" I would also

 find the ALSA documentation crystal clear ;-).

 Paul Perkins
 sigmotto: Liberty is theft.