> what makes an API 'official' under Linux, anyway? in my opinion, the
> old maxim, "use what works" applies .. and ALSA has proven to be a
> very difficult and annoying thing to get set up and working (witness
> jwz' recent terror) .. while MidiShare has (for the most part) been
> smooth and dreamy.
well, there are hassles with ALSA but ... that is a below the belt
comment. jwz's hassles were with audio not MIDI, and audio *is* hard to
make smooth without per-vendor drivers. it "just worked" for him on OS X
because Apple pick the audio interface. several people provided
reference SuSE supported h/w configs for example - had he been using one
of them, it would have "just worked". what jwz wants is what everybody
else wants, and its an entirely reasonable thing to aim for - all
supported audio devices are just plug-n-play. it doesn't work that way
on OS X, it doesn't work that way on Windows, and being a stupid
petulant geek who continues to try to trade his involvement in lucid
emacs, netscape and mozilla as excuses for his bad temper doesn't get
Linux any closer to the goal.
i have been amazed to see how *well* Linux+ALSA installs on various h/w
has worked in the recent past - its better than you'd get if you tried
to install OS X (or Windows) on machines with the same h/w, assuming you
could even manage to do that.
ALSA's biggest problem was that people like me shaped its design too
much. I was trying to ensure that ALSA was useful for pro-audio setups,
and I had little interest in the desktop story. There were no
(sufficiently) vigorous advocates for that world as ALSA developed, and
we are seeing the cost of that now.
--p
Received on Mon Jun 13 20:15:11 2005
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Mon Jun 13 2005 - 20:15:11 EEST