On Mon, 2004-01-19 at 21:17, Matthew Geddes wrote: > On Tue, 2004-01-20 at 15:35, Noah Roberts wrote: > > > I guess you could say its stable, but it sure doesn't seem very useable > > to me. I am quite good at getting things to work, even when they don't > > want to, but nothing I do can make ALSA functional so just how useable > > is that? > > That doesn't necessarily mean that the ALSA source is to blame. There > are plenty of other people who have managed to get it work very nicely > (in many cases, much better than OSS could provide). If it were as bad > as a few of you are making it out to be, it would never have been > accepted into the kernel. In fact, that's the reason we're only seeing > it included in the 2.5/2.6 kernel series. > Matt, My 2 cents...I don't think it's quite that simple, or at least it doesn't seem that simple to me. This whole thread has been about comparing apples and oranges. In my opinion Alsa as a project has both made huge advances, and has a huge structural problem that may never be fixed.
1) Alsa really does work, or does work for some. It has small problems, but with the right sound card it probably works really well. (Right being defined as the same sound card one of the primary developers has) 2) For an apparently large and vocal group Alsa doesn't work very well at all. In many cases I think this comes down to the Alsa developers letting sound card drivers join the supported cards group even though the drivers are not well tested and in many cases don't work at all. Worse, there is no continuing support for specific cards. Driver developers move off to do new things and drivers fall into a state of disrepair. Reported bugs never get talked about, much less fixed. For this group of people Alsa is really a big mess. It's really hard reading these lists to know what the relative size of the two groups are. I'm sure there are lots of happy people out there that don't report that everything is working great. Happy people seldom squeak. On the other hand, the unhappy often squeak, but it's hard to know the size of that group also. So, just because Alsa is in the newest kernels doesn't mean it's really a solution ready for the masses. More, I think, that it's the best thing going in Linux audio. Cheers, Mark ------------------------------------------------------- The SF.Net email is sponsored by EclipseCon 2004 Premiere Conference on Open Tools Development and Integration See the breadth of Eclipse activity. February 3-5 in Anaheim, CA. http://www.eclipsecon.org/osdn _______________________________________________ Alsa-user mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/alsa-user
