ALSA on BSD

Posted Nov 26, 2004 15:51 UTC (Fri) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)
Parent article: Inside EuroBSDCon 2004 (O'ReillyNet)

At my place of work there are a lot more Linux desktops than Macs. Maybe 10:1 and it's more like 50:1 with servers, the OS X rack machines are mostly a token effort from someone with budget and an Apple fetish. In fact, system wide we probably have more Suns than Apples.

(We do have some non-Apple BSD machines, but they're routers)

The fact that the audio subsystem stuff went by without comment is a bad sign for BSD on the desktop outside of Mac users. Three years ago there was enough interest, and more importantly enough time, to clone ALSA's library APIs on say FreeBSD and put in place the foundation to do the hardware work later. BSD users would have been able to run ALSA software by now, albeit with reduced functionality compared to the same application & hardware under Linux.

But it never happened, and today their practical choice for audio work is between using 3-5 year old software packages and switching to a Linux distro. In part the blame must rest with BSD audio hackers who let core team members say things like "our drivers are as good as, even better than those of ALSA" while ALSA was shipping 16 channel 24-bit pro audio drivers and the best you could expect on a BSD was CD stereo. When someone with decision making power says something laughable like that, you need to make sure everyone knows why you're laughing or they'll take it as tacit acceptance that they were right.