[linux-audio-dev] Still I cannot understand why...

New Message Reply About this list Date view Thread view Subject view Author view Other groups

Subject: [linux-audio-dev] Still I cannot understand why...
From: Ivica Bukvic (ico_AT_fuse.net)
Date: Wed Dec 12 2001 - 00:43:28 EET


Hi fellow LAD enthusiasts!

I am still extremely bothered by the fact that Linux does not have a
decent sound daemon which would solve all of our troubles in respect to
having /dev/dsp resources hogged by a particular application, as well as
backwards compatibility with esd and arts compatible apps...

In the beginning there was esd, and unfortunately, it still is... It is
a latency hogging daemon which requires application compatibility to
work and is yet to be replaced by something better...

Then, we had (and still have) somewhat "bloated" Arts which was
originally designed to do something completely different and currently
offers very little to write home about (granted, it does what it's
supposed to, but offers no platform-wide compatibility, neither yields
great latency results).

Finally, we have JACK, which does very well in the latency department,
but it is again something that has to be incorporated into the app in
order to work, so has no ability to act as a system-wide highly
efficient sound daemon. Neither does it solve the issue of hogging the
/dev/dsp resources (please correct me if I am wrong).

Any my question is simply why?

It is obvious that if we put a lot of effort into a single high quality
sound daemon, the sharing of dsp resources between different apps at the
same time would become a breeze, meaning that this problem would not
have to be circumvented every time someone chooses to write a new audio
app for Linux.

There has been a project that started a while ago called asd
(asd.sourceforge.net), which had some promising elements, but it seems
to be pretty much frozen in its tracks.

So, my question goes out to you once more, why?

Please do not let my words offend you (esp. the developers of the
above-mentioned stuff), I am just extremely frustrated at this point
since I've just finished my first app that could potentially be very
useful to me, yet I am unable to use it since my my laptop card (ESS
Maestro M3) is not capable of mixing multiple streams of incoming sound
due to this limitation, and I honestly do not have time to learn the
whole ALSA API and then learn a month later that it has completely
changed...

Your constructive comments and ideas would be much appreciated!
Sincerely,

Ivica Ico Bukvic


New Message Reply About this list Date view Thread view Subject view Author view Other groups

This archive was generated by hypermail 2b28 : Wed Dec 12 2001 - 00:37:31 EET