[ANNOUNCE] New Mixer Handling in PA 0.9.16/F12

[Lennart Poettering]

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 not sure where this "CD in is obsolete" comes from.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:

- It doesn't work with USB cd drives

- It doesn't work with USB sound cards

- It doesn't work with Bluetooth headsets

- It doesn't work with SPDIF out

- It doesn't work if you have more than one cd drive

- It doesn't work if you have more than one audio device

- Modern cards don't even have the connector anymore

- 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.

- 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.

- 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. 

Doing digital grabbing of is very reliable these days. The analog path
is just completely obsolete.

Every time someone brings the analog cd playback path he's just making
a complete fool out of himself because it is so very obvious that the
issue is made up and even he himself hasn't used that feature for
years. Because otherwise he'd know how broken it is.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net
http://0pointer.net/lennart/           GnuPG 0x1A015CC4