[Alsa-user] shittiness

[Steve Conrad]

In the past I always kept away from sound on linux, because it sucked.   Somewhat reluctantly, I gave it another stab last month and enjoyed a brief blaze of funtionality during which time I was able to sequence a number of my compositions with Rosegarden. Then suddenly, my speakers blew and the sblive I'd been using kept making a screaming sound that offered to blow any more speakers I connected to it. I slapped in another sblive, but now nothing can be done to make it work. Suspecting the machine was damaged in some way, I cobbled together another test machine on which to test the card. Same results. Alsamixer won't run and no sound. Card works fine on FreeBSD and under windows, so it's not a hardware issue. The new card must differ from the old in some way not well accomodated by alsa.   I've been screwing around with this alsa crap for weeks now with no resolution in sight, and no helpful advice from this mailing list regarding my earlier posting.   I'm a sysadmin used to working with the details of network services, so I'm not exactly hopeless at this sort of stuff. But I just keep getting dragged deeper into the squalid intricacies of linux and alsa with no return of satisfaction.   While linux can do many things well, sound isn't one of them. With a copy of Cakewalk going $129, I can't really justify wasting anymore of my time on this very shitty software arrangement.   Alsa is no good. It's rickety and unreliable. No serious musician would waste their time with this bullshit.