[ANNOUNCE] New Mixer Handling in PA 0.9.16/F12

[Doug Ledford]

On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 12:36:38AM +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> On Thu, 30.07.09 16:53, Matthew Woehlke (mw_triad at users.sourceforge.net) wrote:
> 
> >
> > Doug Ledford wrote:
> >> Every system I build still keeps the analog signal cable between the
> >> CD/DVD and the soundcard. This doesn't help if I try to watch a movie
> >> as that signal has to be decoded and then played, but for audio CDs
> >> it is still a perfectly acceptable means of playing the music. So I'm
> >> not sure where this "CD in is obsolete" comes from. Even the
> >> motherboard I bought about 2 months ago still has a CD in port and
> >> the CD/DVD in that machine still has an analog output.
> >
> > CD is digital and can be read in digital format by your CPU and sent in  
> > digital to the sound device. This is lossless.
> 
> Adding here:
> 
> The "analog" path for CDDA is completely broken and obsolete:

And adding here that CD in is just one of two analog in paths I use that
I don't want to do digital data transfer on.  You didn't address the
other one.

> - It doesn't work with USB cd drives

Depends on wether or not the drive has an analog out.  Most don't, but
I've seen them in the past that do.
 
> - Modern cards don't even have the connector anymore

As mentioned in my previous mail, my most recent motherboard purchase
does, and so did all my previous purchases.

> - There is no way to get acces to the PCM data before playing it,
>   meaning no equalizers applied, no visualizations, no signal meters,
>   no suurrround upmixing, no nothing.

Well, duh.  I don't *want* that junk.  I want a zero intervention pass
through that leaves my system unoccupied by mundane, trivial crap. Oh,
and my sound card automatically plays 2 channel stereo line in as either
4.1 or 5.1 output, so I *really* don't want CPU based surround upmixing.

> - There is no way to figure out if it is actually connected, so
>   exposing it would more often than not show something that doesn't
>   work at all.

I *know* it's connected, I connected it myself.

> - and the killer argument: we don't even ship a CD player app that
>   could make use of the analog  CDDA playback path. To my konwledge 
>   there is none in the default install, nor in the entire distro. 

And this has nothing to do with whether or not the mixer should be able
to deal with analog in to analog out directly, which was my complaint.
The CD portion of it was just one instance, the other being my use of
line in for my iPhone.  Assuming that because you don't have access to a
CD player that does CDDA based playing today means that it simply
doesn't work in the hardware is just silly.  And assuming that because
your CD in path doesn't work that no analog input path should be
redirected in hardware to speakers is also just as silly.