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

[Dieter Plaetinck]

On Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:08:00 +0100
<hollunder at gmx.at> wrote:

> 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).

Note that jack doesn't talk to hardware directly. it's up to drivers
(alsa,  ffado, ..) to do that

> 
> 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.
> 

Note that both paul davis (jack author) and lennart poettering (PA)
agree that both products are good stuff but serve a different purpose.
on the long term, they both wish a single audio/midi server which a
unified api which works for pro-audio (lowlatency) and desktop (low
powerconsumption). (think coreaudio but better)
on lwn.net there was an article about that recently.
see also
http://www.cio.com.au/article/320807/open_source_identity_pulseaudio_creator_lennart_poettering?pp=1

I met Lennart 2 weeks ago and he told that right now you can have a
desktop system with PA, when you start jack, PA will detect that and
change it's stuff to give jack access to the hardware and PA will talk
to jack. 

he also had a very strong and negative opinion about OSS. he said the
design goals are fundamentally flawed, trying to do way too much things
in kernel space (such as floating point calcs etc)

and oh yeah, he likes stuff like dbus and such.

Dieter