[MPlayer-dev-eng] audio_out.c question

[Rich Felker]

On Thu, Mar 23, 2006 at 03:53:22PM -0500, Mitch Golden wrote:
> I guess this is a question for Rich - is the concern one of principle that 
> you feel that no OS should mix the sound in software, or is it a concern 
> that alsa in particular has bugs?

The principles are:
- the application should not need to use libraries to access sound.
- a library should NEVER do anything that alters the state of the
  calling program.
- software mixing is a bad idea because it's impossible to synchronize
  correctly, bug-prone, etc.
- a well-designed api that conforms to the unix philosophy for
  hardware access and which is standard across all unices which
  support sound should not be replaced by a bloated, buggy,
  windows-inspired, linux-specific api (ALSA)

I have no problem with software mixing being available to apps which
use it directly, or transparently in kernelspace as long as it does
not introduce bugs. What I do have a problem with is implementations
(ALSA) that do broken hacks that mess up the calling program's state
(child processes, etc.) in order to provide software mixing behind the
user's back.

> Given that windows now allows multiple 
> apps to play sounds concurrently, the same will be expected of Linux.

No, Windows also has BSOD. Should we add that to Linux?
Windows also has a registry. Should we add that to Linux??
Windows also has 2gig ram usage by base OS. Should we add that to Linux??
...

Rich