Re: [RDD] Rivendell, ALSA support

[Fred Gleason <fredg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Friday 18 June 2004 16:07, Dan Mills wrote:

> OSS was easy (but somewhat limited), ALSA is IMHO a pig (but probably
> mostly due to the variety of soundcard hardware out there), a better job
> could have been done of the library to present a more unified interface to
> client applications. We should not have to care about the difference
> between 24 bit and 24 bit packed in 32 bit samples!

Only some applications do need to care, so it's appropriate to differentiate.  
This really is ALSA's strength -- in theory, it allows *every* feature of the 
sound card to be accessed, for those apps that require this level of control.  
For those that don't (the great majority), there are various abstractions 
available:  OSS, and now JACK.  The ALSA developers have also been discussing 
adding a new 'simple' mixer abstraction that would layer on top of the 
existing Ugly API so as to make simple mixer operations, well..., simpler.  
The documentation issue is killer, though.  'Read the source code' was 
acceptable for a project that was in development, now that they've gone 1.0, 
it really is time for some decent docs.  This is one of the things that has 
made HPI a joy to work with -- the API documentation is uniformly excellent.

Your mention of OSS has started me on an interesting chain of thought, though.  
Now that we have Rivendell's driver dependencies cleanly abstracted, it would 
be almost trivial to add direct OSS support.  This could be rather useful for 
supporting certain setups, like (say) a bunch of ES1371-based sound cards.  
Using them with JACK would be nearly impossible due to the lack of hardware 
sample-sync, but OSS could drive them nicely, *and* OSS has a nice, uniform 
mixer model.  Hmmm...

Cheers!


|-------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Frederick F. Gleason, Jr. | Director of Broadcast Software Development  |
|                           |             Salem Radio Labs                |
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|    Documentation is like castor oil:  managers know it must be good     |
|    because programmers hate writing it so much.                         |
|                                        -- Anonymous                     |
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