Comments on: Making ALSA suck less in GNOME

By: ForbannelÅ¿e

ForbannelÅ¿e — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 10:02:01 +0000

ALSA is terrible. I have a feeling it was written by an engineer, for an engineer. Troubleshooting anything that goes awry with sound is a good waste of a day thanks to ALSA. Recently setup icecast to stream but got horrible static screeching with nothing playing. Turns out having the AUX (for Auxiliary I guess?) mixer setting turned up for my tvcard caused it. Ok, so I turn it down and have to bump it again to hear the tv? So I try changing the capture source... which you have to change to the capture setting? Makes no sense to capture capture! growls I've been using Linux for 8 years now, even know how to recompile the kernel, and nothing has given me as much grief as ALSA.

By: Isabella

Isabella — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 05:16:22 +0000

Yep...

                   There's no place like ~

...

By: RÃ©mi

RÃ©mi — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 11:11:54 +0000

I haven't used alsa-lib directly, but I think that one of the issues with this lib is that it's easy to mess up.

At one point, I had some sound and video files that I would play in mplayer, totem, audacious (xmms fork) and bmpx (back when it used xine). All of them used alsa directly (totem through gstreamer) but they all had some minor glitches in how they played the sound.

Maybe Gnome/Gst peeps should be proactive with the alsa folks and propose evolutions of that lib, get things right (just like gst-0.8 was ok, but gst-0.10 just rocks)

By: jono

jono — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 08:46:37 +0000

Hi all,

Sorry not had time to reply, been really busy.

When looking at this problem, I think it is important to first identify if these problems are the responsibility of ALSA, and when whether they are fixable. As an example, the ALSA developers may say that easy config is impossible as HAL needs updates, or kernel developers are not implementing certain functionality.

From the outset though, it seems that these problems can be divided into two areas:

Functionality
Configuration

In terms of functionality, I don't know an awful lot about the subject. I am sure there are reasons why certain things don't work on cards.

In terms of configuration, these seems to be the crux. I am convinced that ALSA is a suitable audio framework and can be made easier to use, but there has not been that much effort gone into it. The analogy here are LADSPA effects - out of the box there are no LADSPA effect presets, but as an application developer, it is my responsibility to ensure the application can make use of presets to ease the process. Otherwise, our users would be lost in a world of horizontal sliders and strange settings.

This really does seem like something that could be solved at the desktop level, and with the quality of our audio stack, I am surprised it has not been solved. Maybe some ALSA developers could comment on these issues, and maybe a GNOME developer can comment on the desktop integration of sound support.

By: OSS Forever! Playing Multiple Sounds Simultaneously

OSS Forever! Playing Multiple Sounds Simultaneously — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 08:40:44 +0000

[...] One caveat is that dmix upsamples everything to 48 kHz. If you care about this, you can find the workaround on this page (see “Does dmix affect sound quality?”). Coincidentally, I ranted about Alsa’s difficult nature earlier today. It’s a shame that Linux still doesn’t have a high quality sound architecture. A few months ago we heard that Monty is working to fix a lot of Alsa’s warts. I haven’t heard of any progress since then but, personally, I can’t wait! [...]

By: iltedesko

iltedesko — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 22:12:56 +0000

Making ALSA suck less in GNOME...

nice.....

By: Richard

Richard — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 19:55:14 +0000

Problem is: Alsa exposes ALL features of the installed Audio Chip, which is a good thing, BUT not all soundcards provide the plugs for all the features of a chip, and their configuration needs to be tweaked in subtile ways to fit the installed Hardware.

Therefore it would propable be needed to provide Profiles for all Soundcards, which is much more work than to provide support for all the available audio-chips. Remember, the alsa team has not that big actually.

By: chunkance

chunkance — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 19:48:26 +0000

Making ALSA suck less in GNOME...

nice.....

By: Mark Brown

Mark Brown — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 18:12:09 +0000

bronson: As I understand it profiles are exactly the sort of thing that the new configuration stuff was focusing on (including stuff like detecting which inputs & outputs are cabled up, what’s connected to them and switching to an appropriate profile). With sensible default profiles this ought to help with most of the problems you mention.

By: bronson

bronson — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 13:17:40 +0000

The single biggest mistake in ALSA is that sound cards come up muted. WTF?? How can the user tell the difference between a broken sound card and a quiet one? Thousands of people have probably given up on alsa when the output was just muted by some random aumix slider waaay over to the right.

Alsa's second biggest mistake is not having profiles! Each sound card should have 3 or 4 simple profiles. Load the S/PDIF OUT profile and your IEC958 buttons and sliders all get set properly. That way, if someone loads the S/PDIF OUT profile and doesn't get S/PDIF output, it's a bug and the profile can be fixed. Right now it seems like every ALSA support request degenerates into questions about obscure settings before most people say, "I dunno. It works for me!"

ALSA is horribly overcomplex and very user unfriendly. It currently works for me, but I'm not happy with the amount of time it wasted.