> Also, he seems to be pissed because he bought one of the new "SBLives" > that uses the snd-ca0106 driver, and expects to get hardware mixing like > a real SBLive. He's just an idiot, and his beef is with Creative, not > the ALSA people.
jwz isn't an idiot, and he doesn't expect h/w mixing. he knows the difference between h/w and s/w mixing. his point is that from a desktop perspective, linux in 2005 ought to just provide [hs]/w mixing as required, with no intervention by the (desktop) user. he's not talking about musicians, or other "creative acoustic types". he's right. what jwz doesn't understand is the limited hw vendor support audio devices get (chipsets changing subtly at random times, undocumented pinouts, lack of adherence to ac97 or other standards). he also doesn't understand how few people produced ALSA. and most of all he doesn't realize the design tradeoffs between the various audio APIs. he's the guy who would have been very happy with the windows kernel mixer-based audio API, and would have known absolutely nothing about why people needed ASIO, GSIF etc. but more broadly, windows is not the gold standard here, OS X is, and the truth is that apple have designed a much better system from day one. on OS X, things do work more or less the way jwz and many other people think they should. JACK gets close, and in a few ways (inter-app connectivity) betters CoreAudio, but it is not a general purpose audio API and there are no whipmasters to force mplayer, skype, and rest of the desktop app developers to use it. --p
