Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Problem with sound card

[Michael Mol <mikemol@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 1:35 PM, Nikos Chantziaras <realnc@arcor.de> wrote:
> On 10/25/2011 08:11 PM, Mark Knecht wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 9:58 AM, Nikos Chantziaras<realnc@arcor.de>
>>  wrote:
>>>
>>> On 10/25/2011 07:17 PM, Michael Mol wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 12:06 PM, Mark Knecht<markknecht@gmail.com>
>>>>  wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 8:53 AM, Paul Hartman
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Or that commercial linux sound driver package... I don't even remember
>>>>>> what it was called anymore.
>>>>>
>>>>> OSS I think - something like Open Sound System or some such other
>>>>> crazy thing, being it was neither Open nor most of the time for me
>>>>> produced Sound on my System. ;-)
>>>>>
>>>>> I think there is still support for it in the kernel. Go figure...
>>>>
>>>> It's only been deprecated for over a decade...I can only barely
>>>> remember a time before ALSA was pulled into the mainline kernel.
>>>
>>> OSS is the standard sound system for Unix still to this day though.
>>> Everybody uses it, except Linux.
>>>
>>> It's GPL by the way.  I actually use it on my main PC ;-)  On supported
>>> sound cards, it works much better than ALSA.  Not the version in the
>>> kernel,
>>> of course, that one is deprecated.  The newest version is v4 and is only
>>> available out-of-kernel.
>>
>> I imagine that it's support for the cards it supported in that time
>> period was probably better than ALSA. I came to Linux looking for a
>> platform to replace Windows to support Avid's ProTools. As I soon
>> learned that wasn't going to happen, at least not soon, and it hasn't
>> changed in the 10-15 years I've been using Linux. However in those
>> days my need for ALSA was driven by OSS not supporting any sound card
>> hardware that was of interest to people recording music. ALSA was at
>> least trying, and has gotten much better over the years with things
>> like Jack and rt-sources which easily outperforms Windows in terms of
>> latency.
>
> That's true.  Though I judge by desktop needs on my machine.  The lack of a
> per-application volume mixer in ALSA is really frustrating.  And if you bark
> about it, you're told to install PulseAudio, which is another can of worms
> entirely :-/  I guess I'm gonna be using OSSv4 for as long as that old
> Soundblaster Live I have here refuses to die.

Agreed; per-app volume controls are nice. The Linux-specific nature of
ALSA isn't such a good thing. Though if ALSA implements an OSSv4
wrapper, that's not so bad. (Not that I think they're likely to; if
the wrapper exposes more functionality than their core supports, it'll
greatly complicate their architecture.)

I also kinda miss being able to test audio with cat. I have a t-shirt
somewhere which says "cat /boot/vmlinux > /dev/audio # The sound of
Linux". That was my quote for my high school's Science Olympiad team
T-shirt. Being able to record audio files using the reverse was also
very convenient, as was testing microphone settings by dumping the
device to the terminal.

-- 
:wq