I think Hannu annoyed a few of us by stating that ALSA is designed by
hackers.
There is absolutely no question in my mind that ALSA is designed by
professionals.
True. However... there are definitely some hackish aspects to the alsa
project. On numerous occasions I have found the files created by alsactl
for my ice1712's to break from version to version of ALSA. Then I have
to check what the mixer settings where, reset them manually, and run
alsactl store again. Lame. The plugin infrastructure seems to often be
variously broken... except for the sample rate & bit rate plugin... and
perhaps dmix. I was able to get dshare working pretty well once... but
an alsa upgrade broke that.
But... it's gratis & libre & generally works great under Jack. So...
Thank you ALSA Team!
If you ask me... I would recommend that the alsa team drop all of the
ambitions plugin stuff (except sampl rate & bit rate) and focus on
building the most stable & broadly supported hardware abstraction for jack.
