Re: [tim-janik/beast] Force alsa default device (#123)

[Tim Janik <notifications github com>]

A bit of evaluation on Ubuntu 18.04:

• Bitwig defaults to opening JACK and issues a warning if that fails. It provides JACK, ALSA and PulseAudio drivers. For the ALSA driver, the user has to select one of the available ALSA hardware drivers (hw:*).
• Reaper defaults to opening JACK and issues a warning if that fails. It does allow the user to manually select ALSA, a dummy driver or PulseAudio. Oddly enough, with ALSA it only recognizes the first hardware device. Reaper allows the project to render with a different sample rate than used by the audio device.
• Renoise tries to open ALSA's first hw device (hw:0,0), its ALSA driver allows manual selection of all ALSA hardware devices (hw:*). If ALSA hw:0 doesn't work, it tries to fallback to its second driver JACK, if that doesn't work it gives up.
• Firefox and Google-chrome simply use Pulseaudio out of the box and support Duplex operation. Via Pulseaudio, it's possible to change between Headphone and Laptop mic/speakers while a call is ongoing. Since they can also mix-in remote audio, they must have some kind of drift-compensation.

Insisting on using a JACK driver when Jackd is not running or not even installed on a system is simply user-unfriendly. Renoise knows better and can play out of the box via ALSA, but if that doesn't work, it's worse of than any of the other programs, because it fails to recognize/use PulseAudio.

The browsers are a magnitude more user friendly than any of the DAWs, they support PulseAudio out of the box, try to minimize latency for interactive calls, work in Duplex mode out of the box and compensate drift automatically.

For Beast, we should simply work as well and as user-friendly as the browsers by picking PuleAudio by default, trying JACK only if Jackd is running and falling back to the first ALSA hw device if it is not busy. That way, power users can manually assign JACK as the default driver and for everyone else, things will work out of the box. But we need some kind of drift compensation when we use PulseAudio in Duplex mode.

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