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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."
If Pulse Audio really sucks, then Linux Audio really is in a sorry state .
When I no longer have to reboot into OS X to do real multimedia production work, then I'll agree that alsa has arrived. But this self-congratulation party is way premature. Linux has nothing that can even begin to rival GarageBand, what to speak of Logic Pro or Pro Tools. I surely wish it were otherwise. In fact, I just got done spending hours fooling with the Pro Audio overlay for Gentoo, and couldn't even get Hydrogen to play nice with or without jackd. Yes, my soundcard is listed as "supported".
Caveat Utilitor
In theory pulseaudio is great. In practice, it sucks. Nevermind, it sucks in theory too :(
Pulse Audio is a bloody disaster. It breaks just about every audio application I have, and even when its not running, it creates over runs and under runs in other ALSA and SDL audio applications (like ZSNES). ALSA, and SDL audio was the perfect sound abstraction system. Pulse Audio screws EVERYTHING up. I have to makle my own patched RPMs to get rid of Pulse Audio hooks in applications. Its bad. Its really bad.
Audio applications should use ALSA but not lock the card. Games should use SDL. Everyone else should follow suit.
If an application is locking a card its the drivers fault. Fix the driver, fix the over runs, and ditch Pulse Audio!
ALSA was a big mistake, from the same mold as the Netscape "Let's throw everything away and start again!" that Jamie Zawinski complained about all those years ago. For some reason the ALSA developers decided that OSS sucked but rather than fix the few issues that existed, they threw it all away and created this huge monster called ALSA. There are some nice ideas in there, such as generic PCM buffer management, but there is no reason those features could not have been added to the existing OSS implementation. OSSv4 proves that it was possible. Instead Linux has plumped for a system that is too complex, poorly supported, poorly documented and disliked by developers. If instead the effort had been applied to fixing OSS, sound on Linux would now be further ahead than it is now. Now that OSSv4 is fully GPL I'd love to see it back in the mainline tree, at least to give users better choice, but sadly I suspect there are some major egos and political posturing that will stop that happening.
The real problem here was created when developers started trying to solve the mixing issue by writing software libraries instead of a specification.
Instead of attempting to write a one size fits all sound library that would interface directly with the sound hardware and provide the direct interface for applications who wish to play sound, what they should have been done was drafting a specification for an API that contains only the most basic audio features (creation of primary / secondary audio buffers, enumerating supported device buffer formats, etc.). The driver provides the implementation for the specification. If the device driver indicates the device is capable of hardware mixing, it should use hardware mixing internally, if it doesn't, it uses software mixing internally, if supports the use of hardware buffers for secondary buffers it can do so, but this all will take place within within the driver specific implementation of the standard specification. This should have been paired with a robust generic open source driver that (hopefully) supported as many generic audio devices as possible. Using the interface exposed by the spec directly might seem a little low level, but additional software libraries could be built on top of that interface for use by applications. The important advantage if they had gone down THIS road is that the single conduit, the arbiter of all things audio in the system would've been the device driver for the sound hardware, which would reside neatly in the kernel.
I hate PA. It's a complex mess and half the time it just doesn't want to work right. There is no way your average user could deal with it. Most of the time I have trouble with it not allowing multiple users to have audio at the same time seemingly due to some twisted sense of how security should work. ALSA is better than PA but still doesn't work a lot of the time.
It sounds like OSS is getting it's act together and just needs someone to hire the lead developer(s) and port all cards missing OSS support over. That sounds like a worthy goal for those selling distros or soundcards. If it works well and is easy for developers then it'll work well for end users. That is what matters. Sound has been my #1 embarrassment when pushing Linux. It has never worked well and it's time we get it fixed.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
So again, what was Linux hoping to achieve by dropping old "obsolete" OSS in favor of increasingly complex solutions?
As far as Ubuntu is concerned, its the same inane neophyte behavior that "obsoleted" Xmms and BMPx in Jaunty in favor of the iTunes wannabe Amarok, which I find much less stable and cumbersome to use. There was absolutely nothing wrong with Xmms as a Winamp-style media player that was quick, efficient and could handle Internet radio and almost all the popular DRM-free formats, yet it was automatically removed with other "obsolete" software. Yes, I can compile it again from source, but it just seems a bit obnoxious. BMPx was another simple media player that was quite nice, albeit with the occassional bug, and it too has been "obsoleted".
For all the evangelism of the Ubuntu community, why are we being driven towards solutions that mimic the proprietary soup-du-jour (iTunes in this case)?
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
Troll. I lolled.
About a gazillion years of linux use lie behind that comment. I love linux to death, its the greatest thing to have happened to 'PC' since .... ever.
The irony lies in the fact that modprobe - in fact the whole, loading unloading kernal modules on the fly - is nothing short of amazing.
I can't think of anything more impressive (in context) than being able to dynamically modify the core OS behaviour through a simple set of command line tools.
The only problem that remains is that 'everyone else' doesn't ever want to even know that stuff is possible.
Invaders must die
"So again, what was Linux hoping to achieve by dropping old "obsolete" OSS in favor of increasingly complex solutions?"
Linux deprecated OSS2, which everyone agrees sucks hard. It was a no-brainer.
OSS3 is significantly better but it was only recently open sourced. Frankly, if the OSS devs hadn't spent most of the last decade with their heads firmly wedged, audio on Linux would probably be in a much better state. Ah well.
Troll?!? What the FUCK slashdot? This is a legitimate complaint and question, not a troll. Off-topic may have been a valid mod, but troll? Seriously, fanboys, take Linus' cock out of your mouth for a few seconds and get a breath of fresh air. You guys are just as bad as the worst apple and microsoft fanboys.
... when application developers or users express concern about a problem in your OS is to attack them, call them liars and FUD rakers, accuse them of being stooges for Microsoft or whatever.
I'm pretty sure the engineer who develops the Flash Linux player is probably on your side, and he was expressing a legitimate concern about a problem with Linux. As best I remember Adobe hired him out of the open source, Linux world. It would probably be more productive to listen to his concerns, and see if maybe, just maybe, there is a problem with audio on Linux. Having tried to write simple audio apps myself using OSS and ALSA I can assure you they have issues, OSS having no mixer at all was a nightmare to make play with more than one audio stream or more than one app at a time, that's why ESD, arts and pulse were created to hide these mixer deficiencies.
ALSA is a ridiculously overdone, convoluted audio API which makes it very painful for audio driver writers and application developers alike. It simply has too many knobs that can be tweaked and turned most of which never get implemented properly by driver writers and can't be trusted.
The simple fact that there must be a dozen different audio API's on Linux many of which exist solely to hide applications and users from the deficiencies in OSS and ALSA tells you something right there.
Rather than attacking this guy maybe you should have the empathy for the guy, he has to deploy an application that is used by probably millions of Linux users, most of whom are ticked off its not open source in the first place and then when it doesn't work perfectly they scream bloody murder. He has to try to make audio work in the face of the fact there are countless barely working or at least buggy ALSA drivers in the world, and there must be about a HUNDRED different ways to configure audio when you count OSS, ALSA, gstreamer, pulse, esd, arts, jack, OpenAL, and a MILLION different configurations when you count all the obscure options you can or in some cases HAVE to set on audio drivers.
As an end user I've suffered through painful, hard to fix audio bugs, in just about every PC I've owned over the last ten years due to audio driver bugs. Sure I could sift through "supported" hardware lists and try to find that rare new PC or laptop where everything is guaranteed to work on Linux, but I would actually prefer to just buy the hardware I want at the price I want. Of course in all fairness to the Linux developer community it is a total bitch to get working drivers on all the PC hardware being put out especially when the vast majority of hardware developers either just don't support Linux, support Linux badly, or actively obstruct Linux support.
You all seriously need to realize that if you want broader acceptance of your wonderful operating system:
A. You need applications and application developers to develop for your system, and not attack them if they point out problems deploying apps on your system. In a perfect world every app would be open source, but there may be some apps which aren't Linux would be better off having as closed source than not having at all.
B. it will have to actually work for ordinary people who aren't going to spend days/weeks/years fiddling with things to try to make it work right.
One of the beauties of the Mac is the hardware is tightly controlled. You may view that as confining and depriving you of your freedom, but it also helps insure the damn thing works out of the box, and most of the applications on it work pretty damn well. After years of fighting nagging bugs on Linux I decided it was in my own best interest to just switch to a Mac for my desktop system and I use my Linux box solely to develop code on. Linux on the desktop is a lot better than it was but unfortunately its just not a very good desktop experience by comparison.
Unless there is a major attitude adjustment in the Linux community that is unlikely to change. Either:
A. Be content that Linux is a niche OS for hardcore fans a
@de_machina
Wait. Claiming audio sucks on Linux is FUD because there's not one, not two, but three mutually incompatible and redundant APIs? How the hell is this not a clusterfuck?
Oh I'm sure there's some reason why someone prefers one to the other, but seriously. You're sending bits to a soundcard. That's it. Just make one API and be done with it. Got a beef with the API? Enhance it, don't just throw it away?
My god, audio was one of the reasons why I ditched Linux for a mac four years ago after running it as my primary OS for ten years prior. Frankly I got tired of having sound work in some applications, but not others. I got tired of guessing which mixer would adjust the sound, which mixer wouldn't. I got tired of seeing "No ALSA cards detected" in my startup, but someone how having `alsamixer` be the one mixer that worked most consistently.
This is a mess made by the developer community and developer community has so far failed to show that it is capable of solving it. If only there were a Benevolent Dictator or something...
Whoever modded you a troll is a moron.
The problem is most likely the video drivers. Download updates from NVidia's website. The free drivers for NVidia cards will get your display working, but it won't be fast.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
The main reason why PulseAudio isn't a good idea:
It is just the best possible counterexample of "Just Works(tm)". In other terms: each time I try it, it just "Doesn't Work(tm)". Without it, sound works more often than not; I don't care why or how as long as it does work. Simple observation: "apt-get install pulseaudio" breaks audio, "dpkg --purge pulseaudio" repairs audio.
Hm. Maybe that's how Linux audio is supposed to be brought to a (relatively) sane state: by breaking it so terribly that rolling everything back to the previous state would almost look like a step forward.
All modern operating systems offer this functionality, most from the command line (ie on OS X it's kextload/kextunload). It's not some amazing Linux thing.
I'm sure from all the rave reviews it's technically superior and all, but right now it's controlled by a paranoid schizo who hasn't got a clue how open source works: after GPLing it and whining that he hasn't suddenly started making money, he now thinks he can dictate what license apps using his API have to be released under.