On Mon, Jun 13, 2005 at 11:22:57AM -0400, Paul Davis wrote: > 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.
And the benefits, of course. Actually, I find it difficult to find anything in ALSA to confirm the idea that the requirements from the pro-audio users have had a negative impact on the system as a whole. For professional use, you probably want to get as close as possible to the original data with nothing in between (i.e. the hw: devices). Now the main problem I see with ALSA for the 'desktop' users are in the control interfaces. Maybe the idea of the driver providing a sort of description of the card (e.g. a list of control elements) and having this info interpreted by a generic mixer application was not the best one. It works in some cases, but breaks down easily when a card has different 'modes', in particular for surround. For example it seems to be quite difficult to get a single volume control for all channels in a 5.1 setup, something a desktop audio user would take for granted. -- FA