Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on October 23, 2004 03:56 PM
Where to begin. . .
First of all, let me state that I run Gentoo for my desktop at home, FreeBSD at work. I am a big fan of Linux in general but one place it sucks BIGTIME is sound. Where to start. . .
First, we have ALSA. ALSA is the current sound API and is now part of the kernel. That's fine, OSS was commercial and ALSA ain't. But unfortuntately while ALSA works well enough it is lacking the most basic of functionality one would expect from a sound system - software mixing / hardware abstraction. Most audio apps you run under Linux are incapable of sharing the sound card. Check Linux forums and you will see craploads of posts from folks asking "Why when I use XMMS can I not hear my game sounds?" (or similar queries).
A partial solution is alternate sound daemons - say aRts under KDE or the "professional" oriented "Jack" audio connection kit. Jack is the more immediately interesting tool since it is *required* by apps such as the multi-track recorder Ardour. Unfortunately, the Jack authors have a seriously negative attitude about USB (it is considered unprofessional, this unimportant) so good luck getting Jack to work reliably with your USB audio interface. More importantly, Jack is incompatible with aRts (or the gnome daemon, I forget its name as I hang mostly in KDE) so if you want to use it, expect to be switching on and off the sound daemon all the time.
The other problem is that many apps have been written (and still do) to the old OSS API which means that they are pretty much guaranteed to break down the road. ALSA works for compatability but expect humps when you finally move to remotely current currently (i.e. when stop the 2.4 series arse dragging).
The good news is that it can only get better but the initial glaring design flaw means that we are stuck with a DOS 5.1 era sound system for the forseable future unless Jack gets adopted as a standard or ASLA fills in its ommissions.
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Posted by: Anonymous Coward on October 23, 2004 03:56 PMFirst of all, let me state that I run Gentoo for my desktop at home, FreeBSD at work. I am a big fan of Linux in general but one place it sucks BIGTIME is sound. Where to start. . .
First, we have ALSA. ALSA is the current sound API and is now part of the kernel. That's fine, OSS was commercial and ALSA ain't. But unfortuntately while ALSA works well enough it is lacking the most basic of functionality one would expect from a sound system - software mixing / hardware abstraction. Most audio apps you run under Linux are incapable of sharing the sound card. Check Linux forums and you will see craploads of posts from folks asking "Why when I use XMMS can I not hear my game sounds?" (or similar queries).
A partial solution is alternate sound daemons - say aRts under KDE or the "professional" oriented "Jack" audio connection kit. Jack is the more immediately interesting tool since it is *required* by apps such as the multi-track recorder Ardour. Unfortunately, the Jack authors have a seriously negative attitude about USB (it is considered unprofessional, this unimportant) so good luck getting Jack to work reliably with your USB audio interface. More importantly, Jack is incompatible with aRts (or the gnome daemon, I forget its name as I hang mostly in KDE) so if you want to use it, expect to be switching on and off the sound daemon all the time.
The other problem is that many apps have been written (and still do) to the old OSS API which means that they are pretty much guaranteed to break down the road. ALSA works for compatability but expect humps when you finally move to remotely current currently (i.e. when stop the 2.4 series arse dragging).
The good news is that it can only get better but the initial glaring design flaw means that we are stuck with a DOS 5.1 era sound system for the forseable future unless Jack gets adopted as a standard or ASLA fills in its ommissions.
CHeers
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