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."

Comments

Re:it's all relative

[delta419]

I can't speak for Logic Pro, but there is a (VERY good) alternative to Pro Tools; Ardour. The ubuntustudio packages had everything I needed to jump right into a professional DAW. I've been using it for high-quality recording/editing for almost a year now, no problems.

What are we trying to achieve?

[Just Some Guy]

Yes, Linux audio sucks. If nothing else, we have three common and incompatible APIs to perform a single tasks, and none of them are definitively better than the others. So, my question: what exactly is it that we're trying to achieve? What's the end goal of creating newer APIs instead of perfecting the old ones, such as moving from OSS to ALSA to whatever they roll out this month?

For comparison, FreeBSD uses multi-channel OSS. You can have a whole passel of processes writing to /dev/dsp simultaneously, because whenever a process attempts to open it, the OS spawns off a new copy. It Just Works. I'm a little amazed that my FreeBSD server's sound handling is so much better than my Linux desktop's and requires approximate zero client configuration. So again, what was Linux hoping to achieve by dropping old "obsolete" OSS in favor of increasingly complex solutions?