On Friday 10 May 2002 19:09, Paul Davis wrote:

> well, i won't reiterate my feelings on that. you all know that i
> consider JACK to be The One True Way to do audio on Linux. Quite why
> anyone is trying to present a list of physical output devices is
> beyond me - what happens if I want the output to go to a hard disk
> recording program, or through a software FX box?

Because for the particular application I'm dealing with, none of those 
destinations would make any sense.  But seriously, I've looked into Jack, and 
would love to use it, as it has some features that would be very handy.  I'm 
currently not using it because of the paucity of built-in data types 
(currently just 32 bit floats).  While that data type is entirely appropriate 
for the signal-processing and DAW type applications commonly discussed on 
this list, it's not very useful for the type of applications I deal with 
(radio broadcast automation and control).  The goal there is to move audio 
data between the disk and the hardware in the most scalable manner possible, 
with little/no signal processing in the traditional sense being done on the 
data in transit.  Since the data is already stored as FORMAT_S16_LE, and my 
target hardware will ultimately want the data in that same format, it's 
pointless as well as a waste of CPU cycles to convert to/from FORMAT_FLOAT_LE 
just for the sake of passing through Jack.  The fact that alsa-lib makes such 
conversions relatively easy is irrelevant here.  And, while I could declare a 
custom data type in Jack, I'd then be back to dealing with the slough of 
complexity in the ALSA PCM layer.

Whew!  Thanks for listening to my ranting.  I appreciate your help, and all 
you do for the LAD community.

Cheers!


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