Hallo, Kevin McCoy hat gesagt: // Kevin McCoy wrote:
Thanks for the info Derek, I have been getting mad crazy errors with ALSA and now I know to use Jack. Is ALSA really in that rough of shape?? It's always been a pain for me since I run PPC hardware which is very, very poorly supported by ALSA unfortunately (I don't think I've had a single machine with a functional line in capture under linux...)
On any Linux system that's not ancient you normally are using ALSA drivers anyway. When you start Pd with "-oss" it will just use ALSA's OSS emulation (and you will use some of the more advanced features, ALSA has to offer). And when you run Pd over Jack, jackd will use ALSA as default as well.
Pd's OSS support is the oldest of the three (or four when you include PA) sound interfaces on Linux, so it is probably the most stable one. However I also ran into problems with "pd -oss" once, which were solved by using "pd -alsa". So I wouldn't say, that either of them is more stable. For example I generally have the most problems when running Pd over Jack, probably because I also do Gem graphics with the same Pd. Currently I prefer "pd -alsa" on my laptop.
One thing to note is that Pd only supports the hw:X and plughw:X devices of ALSA. I couldn't make Pd accept the full range of possible ALSA devices (which is basically unlimited as you can give devices arbitrary names in your asoundrc config file). And when using hw:X, Pd for example doesn't support 24bit devices directly, you need to use the slightly less efficient plughw:X devices then.
But I wouldn't share Derek's opinion that Pd's ALSA support is basically unusable. (As for me, -jack is less usable than -alsa.) It's worth trying all options until you find something that works for you.
Ciao
Frank Barknecht _ ______footils.org_ __goto10.org__