[linux-audio-user] Sound cards inquiry (onboard solutions).

[Gain Paolo Mureddu]

Lee Revell escribió:
> 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)

> 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.