LPC: Linux audio: it's a mess

Posted Sep 21, 2008 23:40 UTC (Sun) by mezcalero (subscriber, #45103)
In reply to: LPC: Linux audio: it's a mess by tialaramex
Parent article: LPC: Linux audio: it's a mess

You seem to know a lot of stuff about me. I am not particular fond of people who turn their dislike of software I wrote into personal accusations and judging in a public forum.

Also, what brings you to the conlusion that "Lennart has spent a LOT of time moaning at ALSA developers"? Sure, I have my issues with some parts in ALSA, and from time to time I let people know about them. But hey, nothing is perfect. Not ALSA. Not PA. In fact, I regularly defend ALSA -- far more often then criticising it. And I think I am pretty vocal about my support of ALSA. Just check the other comments I wrote to this article. ALSA is good stuff -- with some issues. More or less exactly like PA. Nothing is perfect -- and certainly software isn't either.

You are believing that ALSA and PA is in competition in some way. It is not. The ALSA devs and I work together. They already fixed quite a few of the issues I had with ALSA. That's collaboration. This is great, and I am happy. In fact at the conference this article was about Takashi and I met once again and we had very fruitful discussions.

You seam to be more of an ALSA fanatic that the ALSA guys themselves. Don't forget that Takashi even packages PA for OpenSUSE!

There is just no competition between ALSA and PA, since PA builds on ALSA. Everyone who thinks there was a competition is wrong, and doesn't get the big picture. Please get your facts right.

Lennart

LPC: Linux audio: it's a mess

Posted Sep 22, 2008 18:19 UTC (Mon) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (1 responses)

The conclusion that you'd spent a lot of time moaning about ALSA was based on reading ALSA's archives in the past and on observing that there is (was?) a lengthy list of alleged problems in ALSA on your PulseAudio site. As far as I know I've never met you in person, and so I have no opinions about you except as a software developer.

ALSA isn't perfect, that's true, I have several enhancement bugs open and I've had discussions with ALSA people about various aspects -- notably I wanted a way to determine which ALSA level ("volume") control, if any, is the most appropriate to tweak for a PCM stream I have open, thus making it possible to make good use of a hardware PCM stream mixer as provided in say an SBLive. The kernel drivers are also not perfect, the driver for my Intel chipset can't properly handle a running audio output during suspend for example. But PulseAudio doesn't (and shouldn't try to) fix that problem.

I am a JACK user, so I am not, as you seem to assume, wedded to ALSA as the solution to all problems. I do think that you underestimated how mature PulseAudio needed to be before it was a better option than the default dmix configuration present in e.g. Fedora prior to PulseAudio. Not so long ago I encountered an old friend who happens to be a Google engineer (I say this only to establish that he's a smart get-things-done guy) who'd basically given up using audio on his laptop because he upgraded Fedora and that installed PulseAudio and broke the sound. PulseAudio's promise is good, but as of the last version I tried (was forced to try) it doesn't deliver that promise for a lot of people yet.

I remain to be convinced about PulseAudio. But don't imagine that I can't be convinced. I wasn't very impressed with early versions of NetworkManager either, but it got better. Probably I'd be less soured on PulseAudio if it had been in Fedora as an optional extra, to get feedback from people who know what they're getting into and perhaps have good use cases (e.g. hotplugging audio devices).

LPC: Linux audio: it's a mess

Posted Sep 23, 2008 13:42 UTC (Tue) by mezcalero (subscriber, #45103) [Link]

The list of ALSA issues I maintain still exists and is regularly updated:

http://pulseaudio.org/wiki/AlsaIssues

Lennart