On Sat, Jun 20, 2009 at 9:53 AM, Davyd McColl<dav...@gmail.com> wrote: > I've had an SB Live for ages. One of the most redeeming features of this > card is hardware mixing. Meaning that I didn't care about OSS lockups or > ALSA's dmix.
Too bad that hardware multiopen support comes at a price: all streams are forcibly resampled, reducing audio fidelity. But I digress... > I tried using PA's mixing and multiple output to use USB headphones and the > onboard Realtek HDA audio. Worked for a while but often left PA locked up. I > would have to kill and restart. My nett conclusion is that PA doesn't do > well with multiple soundcards, despite the advertisements. That symptom is a combination of outdated ALSA (-kernel, -lib, -plugins) and PulseAudio. I've outlined[0] release schedule misalignments that exacerbate this symptom. > So now I use the onboard sound exclusively. PA behaves (mostly) for me, but > the sound is a little latent -- and I'm not a person who creates music or > anything like that. I can deal with the minor latency because it doesn't > really affect me. Someone who mixes digital music on the other hand (and I > have a friend who does) can't use PA. PA is not the use case for people mixing digital music. The Linux audio community is finally coming to a consensus that desktop audio is the realm of PulseAudio, and professional audio is the realm of Jack Audio Connection Kit. Interaction between the two is being improved. > I would welcome (and I'm sure other > users would agree) any subsystem which: > > 1) Worked (all the time, without random lockup) Difficult to accomplish when the hardware is faulty, which is far more common on older Creative cards than one might think > 2) Wasn't latent Different use cases here, see PulseAudio vice JACK > 3) Wasn't a mission to set up > 4) Just handled mixing > 5) Could handle multiple soundcards easily Being improved for both the desktop and for professional audio > OSSv4, from the > posted article, looks like it handles the average user's requirements quite > well. I guess it's up to whether it's worth patching into the Linux kernel > for *buntu distros or if the kernel devs want to include it. Well, if you consider the average user not to care about her/his integrated laptop audio or USB headset, sure... > dmix to work -- oddly enough, some distros actually have tools to make it > work for you. I haven't seen something like that on *buntu Pre-Karmic shipped asoundconf(1). We've stripped it from alsa-utils, because it was becoming increasingly bearish to maintain, and because the magic alsa-lib runes necessary are really PulseAudio's realm. > It would indeed be a great step forward to have sound work under Linux in > the same manner that windows users are accustomed to: it just does A noble objective. Now who's with me? -Dan [0] http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~dtchen/UDS-Barcelona/ -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
