LPC: The past, present, and future of Linux audio [LWN.net]

LPC: The past, present, and future of Linux audio

Posted Oct 7, 2009 21:08 UTC (Wed) by mjthayer (guest, #39183)
Parent article: LPC: The past, present, and future of Linux audio

> He outlined what kind of audio support is needed for Linux, or, really, any operating system. Audio data should be able to be brought in or sent out of the system via any available audio interface as well as via the network. Audio data, as well as audio routing information, should be able to be shared between applications, and that routing should be able to changed on the fly based on user requests or hardware reconfiguration. There needs to be a "unified approach" to mixer controls, as well. Most importantly, perhaps, is that the system needs to be "easy to understand and to reason about".

BeOS anyone?

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LPC: The past, present, and future of Linux audio

Posted Oct 8, 2009 10:57 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

BeOS punts most of the issues they were discussing there as far as I can tell.

For example, where is the audio data going? In _theory_ BeOS lets applications connect up any kind of graph. In practice, nearly all software asks for the system's default (software) mixer and feeds it 16-bit PCM.

Someone wrote a piece of software "Cortex" which exposes the graph, but if you actually install it and play around, first of all you'll crash a lot (Cortex and sometimes BeOS too) and secondly you'll start to find all the weird little bugs no-one encountered because they always hooked things up to the default mixer. So rather than exposing the graph in a way that users can play with it, like the various JACK graph tools, it behaves more as a debug tool for developers who know how to tread carefully.