Lee Revell escribió:
Yep, it sucks. The impossibility of making in-kernel OSS emulation with
the advanced features of ALSA is probably the #1 unresolved sound issue
afflicting the Linux desktop. The only solution I see is to get these
apps fixed. Skype and Macromedia (flash plugin) have been promising
native ALSA support for some time now - maybe that will happen
someday ;-). We should try to educate closed source vendors that OSS is
not a reasonable option.
You could help by trying to figure out why these apps won't work with
aoss - there are a few open ALSA bug reports with lots of info already.
I also realize that having a drive agnostic system like GStreamer is a
good thing too (sort of like a HAL for multimedia apps), as GStreamer
would communicate with the driver which would do soft mix via dmix and
it would also be completely compatible with other Unix systems like
*BSD, regardless if they use OSS for their sound drivers (as 4Front OSS
is still the main driver supplier for pretty much all of the other Unix
systems), this seems like a good idea especially for media players, but
for other applications that require more direct access, having an ALSA
compatible output would be best (like Skype, games, TeamSpeak, etc)
I don't think anyone has designed a new hardware mixing device in years.
It's all single-access with software mixing these days because it makes
the hardware cheaper. The Envy stuff will never support hardware mixing
because it works on Windows without it ;-)
Lee
I kind of figured that much (the Envy24 arch not having a hardware
mixing DSP), just needed to be sure about that. Indeed hardware mixing
cards are quite expensive, as still today an Audgy 2 ZS sells for nearly
as much as an X-Fi Extreme Music edition (about $160 USD) down here.
