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A few years ago, ALSA software mixing was not enabled by default and didn't work well when enabled. When not enabled, apps couldn't share the audio device at al

A few years ago, ALSA software mixing was not enabled by default and didn't work well when enabled. When not enabled, apps couldn't share the audio device at all. Yes, disabling sound mixing will prevent multiple applications from using the sound card at once, in much the same way as disabling graphics drivers will prevent X11 from working. KDE created aRts to allow sharing at the app level, but aRts sucked, plus it hogged the audio device so non-aRts apps wouldn't work at all. aRts is for pre-ALSA (ie OSS) applications. It doesn't belong on an ALSA-based system, and will obviously not get along well with a modern stack. I'm not denying there are lots of distributions which are configured poorly, but any decent distribution such as Red Hat or Debian worked well. I disagree that glitch-free playback and per-application volumes are "solutions in search of problems", but that's personal taste. If somebody wants to run without PulseAudio, they can. Reading the blog post, it seems he was surprised when upgrading to a bleeding-edge development version caused problems. The last link is written by an OSSv4 developer. OSSv4 is unlikely to ever gain mainstream acceptance because it contains insanity such as performing floating-point math in the kernel. Aside from people are literally hired from the company developing OSSv4, I have heard no good news about it, and there do not appear to be any movements back to an OSS-based stack.

modeless 17y ago
Yes, disabling sound mixing will prevent multiple applications from using the sound card at once, in much the same way as disabling graphics drivers will prevent X11 from working. X11 never came with graphics drivers disabled by default. aRts is for pre-ALSA (ie OSS) applications. aRts isn't "for" ALSA or OSS applications; in fact it doesn't play nice with either. aRts is for aRts applications. aRts has backends for both OSS and ALSA. There's no reason glitch-free playback and per-application volume control can't be done in the kernel. The only feature that makes sense to do in user space is network transparency, which is of limited utility.
nixx 17y ago
There's nothing wrong with floating-point math in the kernel (unless your CPU has no FPU!) Arguably the best-performing audio driver API of the moment is CoreAudio (on Mac OS X) - and that uses floating point code in the kernel... ;-)

modeless 17y ago

Yes, disabling sound mixing will prevent multiple applications from using the sound card at once, in much the same way as disabling graphics drivers will prevent X11 from working. X11 never came with graphics drivers disabled by default. aRts is for pre-ALSA (ie OSS) applications. aRts isn't "for" ALSA or OSS applications; in fact it doesn't play nice with either. aRts is for aRts applications. aRts has backends for both OSS and ALSA. There's no reason glitch-free playback and per-application volume control can't be done in the kernel. The only feature that makes sense to do in user space is network transparency, which is of limited utility.

nixx 17y ago

There's nothing wrong with floating-point math in the kernel (unless your CPU has no FPU!) Arguably the best-performing audio driver API of the moment is CoreAudio (on Mac OS X) - and that uses floating point code in the kernel... ;-)