Re:[Alsa-user] shittiness

[Jason C. <jhc...@ch...>]

The way Steve said what he said was rather rude and sounded whiny.  
But I *do* believe he's basically correct about a few things.

Remember when some Microsoft sponsored benchmarks showed that Linux 
had some problems and a lot of zealots screamed because Microsoft was 
attacking Linux?  Linus came out and said, "You know, they're actually 
right.  These ARE some weak points in the kernel.  Let's fix them."

Likewise, perhaps it would be good to take some things away from this 
to concentrate on FIXING with Linux, ALSA, and music/audio 
applications:

1. Feature support for many cards is not on par with support in 
Windows and Mac OS.  I know that vendor support has something to do 
with this but maybe that can be viewed as a challenge?

2. Configuration is not terribly easy.  It would be really cool if 
there were very easy to use graphical tools for all the PCM plugins 
(that I still don't entirely understand), routing, conversion, 
multichannel stuff, and so on.  These tools would be installed and run 
automatically upon installation or detection of new audio hardware.  
That would rock.

2b. Particularly, multichannel stuff (mainly surround sound) seems to 
cause a lot of trouble, both from my own experience and from what I've 
seen on this list.  It should be as easy as, if not easier than, the 
cool little control panels that are distributed with most sound cards. 
  This is not just flash, it's really easier to click a button and get 
automatic 5 channel output than to mess around with a config file.

3. Less reliance on 3rd parties.  There are definitely benefits to 
having 3rd party tools (mixers, audio players, MIDI routing apps, and 
so on).  But I think there need to be more complete examples of these 
shipped with ALSA itself.  Maybe appropriate the best of the 3rd party 
apps and officially incorporate them into ALSA?  As a user, it's very 
irritating to be told, "Oh, go download this package, and this 
package, and this package, and this package, and this package, and 
this package," all for functionality that's present in other OSes by 
default.

Basically, we don't want to make Linux and ALSA as easy to configure 
and use as Mac OS or Windows.  We want it to be EASIER.  Right now, 
it's not as easy to use as the other options but why even settle for 
being pretty good?  We should go forth and destroy the competition! 
:-)

Now, I anticipate this question: "So what are YOU doing about it?  You 
can't criticize if you aren't doing anything."  I'm not much of a 
programmer yet.  I've started playing with it but I am NOT that 
knowledgable yet.  I'm learning and I'll try to help some.  That's not 
my fault and that doesn't mean I don't have any valuable ideas.  Also, 
I'm not telling anybody what to do, only offering the truth that I've 
seen.  You don't have to listen to me, even though I really wish you 
would.