On Wed, 2006-05-17 at 18:30 -0500, Gain Paolo Mureddu wrote: > 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) IMHO Linux and OSX are the only relevant Unices today. I can't believe that Skype would cripple the Linux version just to run on FreeBSD or Solaris if they knew what they were doing... I suspect they were simply not aware that the in-kernel OSS emulation lacks so many features compared with native ALSA. Or maybe they assumed that it was something that could be fixed eventually (which is impossible as ALSA implements mixing, routing, volume control, SRC, etc in userspace). > , 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) > True, but then you get into sound server dependencies, Gnome vs KDE issues, etc. ALSA is the one option that's guaranteed to work on any modern Linux distro. > > 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. > Well, you can still get a hardware mixing SBLive! for $10 or Audigy 2 Value for $30 IIRC... Lee
