[vox-tech] Re: Re: SoundBlaster 16 woes (Peter Jay Salzman)

[Peter Jay Salzman]

On Mon 27 Dec 04,  4:03 PM, Nick Schmalenberger <nschmalenberger at fastmail.fm> said:
> "Peter Jay Salzman" <p at dirac.org> said:
> > You'll know if something is wrong.  I'm wondering if it's a kernel
> > dependency bug?
> 
> Try ALSA.

Hah!  I'm kicking myself for not suggesting this.  Yes, definitely follow
this advice.  I'm not sure why sb was turned off -- maybe the packager's
intention was to force you to use alsa?

But Nick is right.  ALSA drivers are supposed to be better written, provide
functionality that OSS doesn't provide, give better performance for your
sound card, and if you ever decide to write your own low level audio,
provide a verbose but vastly superior and uniform API.

The worst thing anybody ever said about ALSA is that the API was incomplete,
but that was years ago, back when Loki was still alive.  I'm sure it's very
complete now.

You're going to have to make the switch at some point.

> Apparently OSS has licensing problems which I guess is why ALSA is more of
> a complete solution now.

As I understand it, there are two guys, "Hannu" and "Dev" (or something like
that) who started to reverse engineer sound drivers.  I believe they donated
most of what's in the kernel's OSS section.

Some of the drivers they kept, and sell them.

   http://www.opensound.com/

They're good guys, and provided really, really bleeding edge drivers which
became invaluable when we got laptops at installfests that had audio
chipsets that weren't supported.

Pete

-- 
The mathematics of physics has become ever more abstract, rather than more
complicated.  The mind of God appears to be abstract but not complicated.
He also appears to like group theory.  --  Tony Zee's "Fearful Symmetry"

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