[arch-general] Audio on Linux, was: We have lost the desktop war. The reason? Windows 7.

[hollunder at gmx.at]

On Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:52:28 -0500
Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin at gmail.com> wrote:

> > But honestly, I can see the mess, and from what I know I'd say the
> > problem stems from alsa being too difficult to use. The alsa
> > developers hide (from a bombardment of user questions) and no one
> > feels up to the task of really resolving the mess.
> 
> I feel more cranky about the plethora of options and the fact that
> they all work differently with no real choice. You install app foo
> that uses JACK, great now you need jack installed and running, but
> your other app, bar, uses raw alsa, so now you have to fiddle with
> settings in multiple places. It's just so tedious and confusing.
> 
> Perhaps you are right that this whole thing comes down to alsa
> sucking.

Jack is kind of an exception here, so not the best example (it uses the
device exclusively, although I heard it's possible to use it together
with PA).

Pa tries to solve that problem, but I'm not sure it can. I think there's
at least also alsa below and possibly one of the earlier abstraction
layers above. I sure understand that problem, and the only solution I
see is reducing layers. But PA might help a bit, because it tries to
get developers to use PA directly instead of what they used before.
This of course doesn't help with legacy applications and there's still
PA itself, but it could be the beginning of some sort of unification.

Maybe someone will write PA without those stupid requirements, or
maybe it can be stripped down, who knows.