Re: [Jack-Devel] re-designing ALSA -- was: How to get mplayer and firefox/flash to play

On 12/21/2011 12:59 PM, Fons Adriaensen wrote:
[..]
> What I propose is that the userspace part of ALSA 
> 
> 5. Separates HW configuration from actually using a soundcard.

Would that not break a lot of existing ALSA apps?
[..]

> 6. Provides multi-client access - split inputs, sum outputs -
> with eventually the option of exclusive access.
> 
> Clients that can't live with the restrictions of (5) link
> with a library (part of the ALSA system) that provides sample
> rate conversion, buffering, alternative access methods, and
> whatever you can imagine in an easy way. 

Are you envisaging that this would be done transparently in alsa-lib, or
would the clients need to be updated?

> This library replaces
> all of dmix, dsnoop, route, etc. The essential difference is
> that the client configures this as required instead of having
> to use some predefined 'plugs' that it can't discover in the
> first place.
> 
> All this would actually be simpler than what we have now.
> 
You will need to take a leaf out of Lennart's book if you want to push
this through! :)

A pragmatic hack would be to patch the discovery of plugs and just make
them appear to be persistent hardware interfaces. Making the mess even
more messy is much simpler than cleaning up :)  The might even be
possible with alsa.conf and asoundrc without any code changes.

just saying,
robin

1324474971.7407_0.ltw:2,a <4EF1E245.5080001 at gareus dot org>