Re: Polypaudio for Gnome 2.10, the next steps

[Alan Cox <alan lxorguk ukuu org uk>]

On Maw, 2004-11-23 at 00:01, Seth Nickell wrote:
> Substantially, I agree with Mike. It seems like this problem should be
> solved at the Alsa layer. In fact, Alsa already has this implemented, we
> just need to have it setup by default on cards that don't support
> hardware mixing.

Solaris doesnt use ALSA, FreeBSD doesnt use ALSA, Irix doesn't use
ALSA.... Embedded audio devices aren't going to be up to  running ALSA
but could run polyp or esd. ALSA doesn't deal with networking nor can it
easily get involved.

I can see the logic in having gstreamer shortcircuit to ALSA for local
audio but that is about it.

> That mixing is no longer done in hardware but has been punted to the
> host system for low cost cards feels like a driver layer issue, not
> something that should be solved by an intermediary sound API. To give a
> crude analogy, this feels like proposing that the host CPU bits for
> Winmodem support should be handled in the application layer.

Correct, and that happens to be the right model for Winmodems too. You
don't want stuff in the kernel when you can avoid it.