Hallo everyone,
I've recently switch to the 2.6.0 kernel and I've decided to
switch to ALSA too.
I've enabled ALSA into the kernel *without* OSS emulation and
I've began to manage to get things works.
PCM playback now works. I've my brave alsamixer and alsaplayer
working and well configured. But I've some minor problem.
In the alsaplayer man page the developers writes
----------------------
-r, --realtime
Enable realtime scheduling. To use this as a nor
mal user, alsaplayer must be SUID root.
----------------------
but if I set alsaplayer SUID root the application won't work
because GTK refuse to start a SUID gtk application.
How can I do ? realtime scheduling is needed to avoid underrun
when other programs are in execution.
Another problem is that the OS doesn't autoload sound modules
when an application try to access to a sound device.
The solution is to preload all sound modules but I wonder if
this is the intended behavior of ALSA.
Yet another problem: ALSA seems to be more CPU intensive of OSS.
In particular some simple games with sound support
and using SDL cannot work decently of my PC while thet works
very well with OSS. The CPU get a very heavy load and the sound
is badly scattered (buffer underrun I suppose).
May be this happens because SDL open "plughw:0,0" by default instead
of "hw:0,0" and the sound is subject to software resampling ?
I've verified that my PC can play MP3 without any problem but
I've not compared the CPU load with OSS.
I want to stress that this is a MAJOR problem because SDL are
widely used.
But the really important problem is about MIDI.
There is a severe lack of information about MIDI playing and
in particular about AWE32/64 hardware.
Although I'm not stupid and I've readed many things about ALSA
still I haven't succeeded to play a *single* midi file !
With the old OSS audio system there were clean instruction of
what to do to make AWE32/64 works. It seems that with ALSA you've
missed this point. Essentially your instruction covers only PCM
playback with AWE32/64.
Also you speak everywhere in the document about "OSS emulation" and
it seems that OSS emulation is required in order to have ALSA works.
Returning to the MIDI problem:
with "pmidi -l" I get somwthing like this
--------------------------
Port Client name Port name
64:0 Rawmidi 0 - MPU-401 (UART) 0-0 MPU-401 (UART) 0-0
65:0 Emu8000 WaveTable Emu8000 Port 0
65:1 Emu8000 WaveTable Emu8000 Port 1
65:2 Emu8000 WaveTable Emu8000 Port 2
65:3 Emu8000 WaveTable Emu8000 Port 3
66:0 OPL3 FM synth OPL3 FM Port
--------------------------
so it seems that everything should work with the "65:0" device.
Of course I need to load the soundfonts but the old sfxload
doesn't work because it was made for OSS and not for ALSA.
Pmidi instructions says to use sfxload to load the font but
of course sfxload doesn't works !!
Is OSS emulation needed ?
Where are the information required ?
My impression is that ALSA developers have neglected MIDI
playing during the development of ALSA in favor of PCM.
regards,
--
Francesco Abbate
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