[MPlayer-dev-eng] [patch] prefer ALSA over OSS

[Vladimir Mosgalin]

Hi Rich Felker!

 On 2007.05.04 at 12:27:47 -0400, Rich Felker wrote next:

> > > Uhg, disgusting. Only viable IM client is bitlbee.
> > 
> > gajim looks nicer.
> 
> Then apparently you didn't look because bitlbee doesn't have a "look".

What makes you think so? I know about it for a long time. I don't like
it for two reasons: first, IRC should just die. It's mostly a pirate
distribution network by now anyway. All real chatrooms should be moved to
jabber rooms. Gating everything to IRC is fundamentally wrong, instead,
IRC among others should be used as jabber transport (and silently die
one day).

Second, there are no IRC clients with features suitable for IM. In fact,
even usage of gui irc clients is mostly questionable, since they fail to
bring enough innovation.

> It already has to!!! Via the alsa library. How is it any different if

No. Take a very simple application - aplay, or mpg321/ogg321 with alsa
output, etc, and they magically "just work", no matter how complicated
stuff in you .asoundrc is and no matter what obscure format your
soundcard supports. The same can't be said for oss applications.

> portable cross-platform library that doesn't know anything about the
> underlying sound system, instead of a nasty Linux-specific library
> like ALSA.

It's truly sad that ALSA is linux-only (and the only anti-alsa argument
for me), however I hope that freebsd, opensolaris and other unix systems
which a fighting for users' desktops will adopt it someday.

> Then you are automatically under the category of special-interest.
> Anyone who's not under special-interest has exactly one device.

No. With two soundcards, I may seem special; however, most people who
plug in external sound card already have onboard sound (so actually I
have 3 sound card, one is just turned off).

If I remove audigy, I'll be left with a single usb sound card. It's
presented as 3 devices in alsa. It was designed this way! It's a very
simple stereo-only soundcard. If you are interested, do 
less `locate Audiophile-Usb.txt` (it should live in
Documentation/sound/alsa/ in your kernel source or docs package).

I guess your next argument will be "anyone who uses usb audio card is
special". You'll be wrong. Anyone who just plugs in so-called "usb
speakers" or any webcam into usb port automatically gets usb soundcard.
Its designed to work this way. As you might guess, most people already
have onboard soundcard, so it's the second one.. and it's usb.. and most
likely it won't work with oss..

> This is because ALSA's "OSS emulation" is emulating an outdated
> version of the OSS API without 24bit sample mode.

Are you going to fix it or are you going to stop recommending oss to
people? Who cares _why_ it doesn't work as long as it doesn't work and
no one cares enough to fix it?

-- 

Vladimir