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State of Sound Development On Linux Not So Sorry After All

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the sounds-like-improvement dept.

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."

2 of 427 comments (clear)

  1. Re:He makes one excellent and crucial point by a09bdb811a · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. Re:He makes one excellent and crucial point by vadim_t · · Score: 5, Informative

    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."

    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.

    If you bothered to try, you'd find that it does.

    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.