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State of Sound Development On Linux Not So Sorry After All
An anonymous reader writes "There have been past claims by Adobe and others that development on Linux is a jungle, particularly with regards to audio. However today, the author of the popular 'The Sorry State of Sound in Linux' has posted a follow up showing Adobe's claims to be FUD, as well as being a good update on where OSS and ALSA are holding today, and why PulseAudio isn't a good idea."
I tried Ubuntu studio on several different machines, and had no luck at all. If you try Pro Tools on the Mac, I'm sure you'll see what I'm talking about. The quality of sound is 100%, and using multiple sound sources not only works, it *just* works. That was not my experience with Ubuntu studio (nor Gentoo, Debian, dyne:bolic, arch, crux). I found them really wretched to work with, if you can even get them to work. Multiple sound sources via jackd? No way, it just doesn't work. Also, the sound quality matters a lot to me, and with alsa it's terrible. I've been trying to do what I do in Linux since 2003. It still isn't ready. I truly hope it will be one day soon...
Caveat Utilitor
Is there any document out there which explains why /dev/dsp doesn't get mixing with ALSA? And why nobody tried to patch that yet?
Yeah, TFA explains it.. Here's it in short: /dev/dsp goes to kernelspace, while ALSA does mixing in userspace. I've no idea how difficult it would be to make ALSA do sound mixing in kernelspace.
Pulseaudio rocks IMO.
I have 7 Internet-connected personal machines at the house (7 Linux boxes, 1 Wintendo), and one Linux laptop is connected to a 5.1 surround system in the office.
Every machine on the network (with the exception of the Wintendo) can play audio over the network through the 5.1 surround system via Pulseaudio, with no appreciable loss of sound quality.
I can sit on the couch with a wireless-enabled laptop and play music from the headless file storage machine through the 5.1 surround system remotely.
We've come a long way, baby.
The developer of PulseAudio explains some of the rationale in this interview.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I'm with you. I've been using Ardour and Hydrogen for years. Also use Rosegarden for keyboard synth. My keyboard is a M-Audio 49-key USB interface, just plug it in and go. I've set up a few audio production systems for friends as well. Shane Bertrand has been recording and mixing his own music on one for 5 years now. A 10 input M-Audio Delta 1010LT sound card, Ardour, and Hydrogen are his main tools. They recorded and produced both CWO albums on this setup. They used 5 mics to record the drummer; Shane's modest system had no problems handling it all, even at more than 40 tracks in a song. He had a Sempron 2500+ and 512MB RAM w/ Kubuntu, just upgraded to a X2 3800, 2GB RAM a few months ago.
There should always be sound mixing, with no ifs, buts, exceptions, or configuration required. It should be there by default for anything that tries to play sound
There is. ALSA's dmix has been enabled by default for a long time, years. Have you even tried Linux? I can't remember the last time I had to 'configure' sound on Linux. Insert sound card, mixer shows up, play sounds. From the ALSA wiki: "NOTE: For ALSA 1.0.9rc2 and higher you don't need to setup dmix. Dmix is enabled as default for soundcards which don't support hw mixing."
The result of this nonsense is that crap like pulseaudio continues to exist
No. Sadly, pulseaudio exists simply to copy Vista. Vista introduced per-application mixers and apparently this is a Cool New Feature that everybody supposedly wants, even if it's a shitty implementation that slows down what was a perfectly working sound system.
Is there any document out there which explains why /dev/dsp doesn't get mixing with ALSA?
If you bothered to try, you'd find that it does.
Xmms is no longer maintained either, the developers have all moved on to Xmms2. So yeah, distro's don't include software that's been abandoned upstream.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
It's a neat feature. But hardly novel or really that amazing. Other Unices offered this, and I'd be surprised if mainframe systems going back 30 years didn't. Heck, SunOS (the predecessor to Solaris) offered this, and it was end-of-life'd before Linux 0.1 was a gleam in any Finn's eye.
Linux 0.01 was released in September 1991. Linux 0.11 was released in December 1991.
The last release of SunOS (4.1.4) was in November 1994. It was supported by Sun until September 2003. Never underestimate the demand for long term commercial Unix support.
Off by one. Linux deprecated OSS3, and OSS4 is now opensource.
And not only does it work better (in my admittedly little experience with it), it's also more in keeping with the UNIX philosophy of treating devices just like any other file. Sure, with ALSA you do have device files, but you pretty much have to use alsalib to use them AFAIK. With OSS, you get to use the standard UNIX file APIs.
Yeah, it's supposed to work, but for some reason for me it doesn't.
And have you looked at that page? It's full of listings of arcane incantations. Really, I just want the darn audio to always get mixed, without having to get a degree in audio engineering to understand what's going on there.
See the dmix page, which says "Normally (without hardware mixing) you cannot use /dev/dsp multiple times directly."
So it seems that if you have onboard audio, and want to have more than one app use /dev/dsp, you're out of luck.