Date: Fri, 19 Jul 2002 15:49:37 -0400 (EDT) From: Stuart Barkley <stuartb@4gh.net> To: freebsd-multimedia@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Advanced Linux Sound Driver (ALSA) for FreeBSD ??? Message-ID: <20020719145431.C38805-100000@precipice.4gh.net> In-Reply-To: <1027085799.12363.6.camel@johncoop.borgsdemons.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Maybe I'm off base here, or just otherwise confused... Correct me if I'm missing anything important in ALSA. On Fri, 2002-07-19 at 00:48, Andreas Klemm wrote: > Does somebody already the idea of porting ALSA to FreeBSD ? > > http://www.alsa-project.org/ I looked at ALSA under Linux a while back. I don't see much point in it at this time. There are some interesting looking Linux projects based upon it (Jack, Ardour) and it may support additional hardware. It may also support MIDI better for those with such a need. Mostly, however, it looks like a code bloat solution to non-existent problems. Perhaps select(2) and poll(2) are not well understood? > Beneath FreeBSD making music is one of my favourite hobbies. > Currently I'm bound to windows for doing homerecording to get > pleasent recording programs. I'm attempting to do a number of audio things under FreeBSD and the OSS device driver interface looks complete enough for most things. > I noticed that there are also some great homerecording tools > available in OpenSource fashion, but they are written to use ALSA. Audacity works well for basic recording tasks and I'm working on some personal things (none yet available). > For me personally ALSA looks like a new de facto standard in the > Linux world. SuSE in Germany already ships wth ALSA. > > ALSA has great soundcard support. Even the high end soundcards like > from Hammerfall with DSPs are supported. List of supported cards: > > http://www.alsa-project.org/~goemon/ Support for high end pro audio interfaces is important. The Hammerfall cards seem to be of interest to a number of Linux folks, thus good support for them. A number of other high end cards are mentioned as possible but not done. > ALSA even comes with an OSS compatibility library, which sounds to > me, that older programs using OSS style are still supported to work, > which sounds good to me. Also, new programs which only use OSS style interface will work more widely and not be dependent upon device driver code linked into the application program. ALSA seems to want a soft interface between the driver and the application, thus the recommendation to use their library instead of standard kernel interfaces. How long will it be until the true kernel interface changes enough that applications will need to link with a new library version to access new kernel driver versions. > Is there some ongoing work/effort on this ??? I would also be interested in tracking this if someone else is working on it. It may be important to getting other Linux programs ported in the future, but those programs are likely to be needlessly Linux specific in other ways. On 19 Jul 2002, John Merryweather Cooper wrote: > Well, I've been working on it off and on. I've gotten the guts > (with the exception of playing cdrom's--doable but requires major > hacking to the code), but there are some serious problems with the > GUI--the damn thing is all but unkillable after starting--it uses > some really weird kludges to "terminate" the app from the GUI that > appear to be quite unstable under FreeBSD (and maybe elsewhere). > There's a new version out though, and after I update all my other > ports, I'll give it another go. GUI? cdrom playing? What do these have to do with a device driver? To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-multimedia" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20020719145431.C38805-100000>