Sharing sound hardware

[Dariusz J. Garbowski]

On 02/06/2005 10:11 AM, Ronald S. Bultje wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-02-05 at 12:25, Dariusz J. Garbowski wrote:
> [dmix...]
> 
>>>Would fixed-samplerate do (e.g. fixed to 48kHz)? 99% of the users won't
>>>notice the difference if you're using a reasonably good resampler. On my
>>>computer (don't know if this is generally true), dmix operates on a
>>>fixed samplerate, regardless of playback.
>>
>>Please, no! This sounds really bad to me (pun intended ;-) I own a card 
>>that can do hardware mixing and really don't like the idea of "being 
>>punished" for that. Especially by something like upsampling almost every 
>>sound I play from 44.1 to 48kHz. And yes, I will notice (is it really 
>>99% of the users who won't? where does this number come from?) -- decent 
>>amplifier, cables and loudspeakers do just that: you start noticing.
> 
> 
> 99% of the users is a random guess. I'm talking about any user here, not
> technical user specifically.

I was suspecting that much, however this sounds like "who cares about 
this 1%" -- I say: "it may or may not be 1%, and they probably care" ;-)

Yes, I understand why users want software mixing if their soundcard 
doesn't support hardware mixing. I was there once. I support effort of 
getting it working out of the box for them. But I wouldn't like for 
Fedora to forget about those who build their machines to have better 
support just to discover that a year later their distro takes away 
support for their harware (or gives them hard time to get that support 
working right again).


> The idea is that dmix is only there when
> needed. If your card doesn't support mixing, well, you don't expect
> anything else, do you? You can't ask for the impossible. If you card
> does, then turn it off. It's not that hard. (And yes, this should of
> course be auto-detected, we're working on that.)

Always good to hear :-)


>>If so, *please* include a note how to do it in Release Notes for FC4.
> 
> 
> I'm sure the fedora people will do that, obviously, but I (for the
> GStreamer side of the thing) prefer to do the right thing automagically.

That would be great! And that's what I would expect to happen if 
implemented correctly, not less.


> I'm not sure that'll be finished by FC4.

I understand that there are some technical difficulties and sometimes 
developers need time to figure out how to do "the right thing" in all 
possible hardware/software configurations.

That's why I'd be happy if there was clear and documented way of turning 
software mixing off if the user wishes. That should also keep it off 
after some related packages get upgraded.

Kind regards,
Dariusz