Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Re: [gst-devel] Re: 0.8 in 2.6 ?

[Joshua Haberman <joshua haberman com>]

On Tue, 2003-10-07 at 09:59, iain wrote:
> On Tue, 2003-10-07 at 10:11, Ronald Bultje wrote:
> 
> > The OSS one is written. The ALSA one isn't written yet, because I don't
> > have a single clue on how ALSA works. 
> 
> Is there anyone who does?

I've spent a lot of time with the ALSA PCM interface, but none with the
mixer.  I have a feeling that writing a *good* mixer plugin for ALSA
that does the right thing on a variety of different soundcards will be
very tricky.  ALSA takes the approach of being extremely flexible and
generic at the cost of providing a very complex interface to the
programmer.

I have just recently discovered how to write an ALSA application that
shows you your soundcards by name (this is in PortAudio CVS), and AFAIK
this is the first program for Linux that has ever offered this
capability.  With OSS it was always /dev/dspX and with ALSA it has
always been hw:X.

In any case, I think the challenge for a gstreamer ALSA mixer plugin
will be deducing what channels of mixer do what based on the information
ALSA gives you.

Josh