> please describe in detail what you
> think a user friendly interface would look like.
There are several issues at different points:
* alsaconf has done a really great job in the past, but meanwhile I see
the need for a replacement which can handle more than one card, support
USB (and in the future firewire) devices, can read an existing
configuration, set a certain device as the default device and so on.
Based on such a new script, we then could build even GUI configuration
frontends (Qt, Gtk, KDE, you name it)
* ALSA aware applications need to offer the possibility to choose the
card to use. Many users have more than one device these days, a cheap
AC '97 one and a cool 7.1 USB device. When playing a video file, there
should be a possibility to tell the player which device to use. On tour
with my notebook I prefer to output audio of a DVD mixed as stereo on
my internal speakers while at home or at a friend's I'll better use my
USB device
* Applications should remember the last used device (not to mention
soundservers here) so the user gets a straightforward experience ("I
once set it up and since then it simply works(TM)")
* Users need a simple GUI to set the default (=most often used) device,
maybe renaming the cards, configuring special options easily (asoundrc
resp. special options in modules.conf like card ordering)
* ALSA runs a driver based on the chipset found. Unfortunately, and I
mainly have those AC '97 chips in mind, these have a huge set of
features a user never needs or even worse which are not available on
the chassis. But ALSA cannot know that because it only knows the chip.
Furthermore ALSA builds a generic mixer interface for the chip. That's
a really cool piece of software, but have you ever tried on a notebook
with an AC '97 chipset to set up your card for VOIP properly? An
average user will be lost. Therefore I had the idea to put an
additional layer between ALSA and the mixer interface so users can
contribute mixer descriptions for wide spread cards. If such an
desription doesn't exist, ALSA could still fall back to the generic
mixer interface
Just my two Cents.
Best regards
ce
Received on Thu Mar 2 00:15:10 2006
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