

Linux sound is a steaming pile - illumen
http://renesd.blogspot.com/2009/09/linux-sound-is-getting-better.html

======
ars
Linux sound is broken IMO till it travels seamlessly over remote connections,
just like a mouse and a screen do.

X handles Mouse and Keyboard and Screen I/O, and there is no reason sound
should not be considered a basic I/O that should go too.

Just add another

    
    
      Section "InputDevice"
    

or xorg.conf, and OutputDevice as well. Each Xserver will list the specs it
can handle (frequency/bitrate/channels), and clients will either adjust
themself to the capabilities of the server, or pick some master format and
convert on the fly as needed.

~~~
anigbrowl
There is already a protocol for this, though not in X. (Edit - well yeah,
that's the point you were making, sorry. But this may be of interest anyway)
It's quite robust and used in a number of commercial applications, like
Reaktor. Unfortunately it seems to have exactly zero traction with hardware
manufacturers.

<http://opensoundcontrol.org/introduction-osc>

JACK is pretty good too...but I see your point. Audio development on Linux
fragmented several years ago - LADSPA vs ALSA was the start of that, IIRC -
and although it's fairly robust today, almost everything feels years behind
the Windows/Mac platforms. Video is even worse. For anyone but experimental
artists or those with an in-house development team, it doesn't offer much of a
platform for commercial work and is likely to scare potential clients away.

------
RyanMcGreal
Sound has been my one big disappointment since moving to Linux. I cannot
_believe_ how broken it is - a hodge-podge of half-built mini tools that don't
play nice together and don't add up to anything close to a decent audio
environment.

I installed Rosegarden on Ubuntu 9.04 with high hopes, but after hours of
monkeying around with it, it flat-out will not play music. Likewise, I
installed timidity and what I had read was a kick-ass soundfont, only to
discover that about a third of the instruments are simply missing.

Arrgh!

~~~
windsurfer
Gnome's new sound manager is wonderful, and Timidity works great in 9.10 :)

~~~
RyanMcGreal
Great news! Just a month to go...

------
icey
I don't understand the "(not worth reading)" at the end of your headline.

~~~
GiraffeNecktie
And why use the words "steaming pile" (i.e. a pile of shit) when that's not
what the article says. Very confusing.

~~~
icey
In retrospect, it looks like this guy is just blogspamming. Nothing to see
here.

