On Mon, 11 Feb 2002, Ivica Bukvic wrote:
I don't mean to instigate a flame-war, but [according to my personal opinion] in a nutshell -- a lot. :-(
For instance:
- I cannot run Ardour, nor most of other Alsa-specific apps (whereas the
other way around is in most cases quite possible)
:) yes, but some times you are not able to run ALSA specific apps on ALSA ... and exactly this is the problem with ALSA support for pd, once added it was constantly breaking on each update. I have been assured that this is not going to happen that often now the API is stable, but still this was the main reason I stopped implementing things in ALSA some years ago, ...
- OSS uses "interleaved" approach to provide multi-channel capabilities,
even for RME that does not have interleaved output. This results in redundant software resampling (unless something has been dramatically changed in recent incarnations of the OSS architecture of which I am not aware, please correct me if I am wrong)
this is wrong for the RME Hammerfall.
- OSS is a standard propelled by a commercial company (and that is
included in the open-source kernel, somehow I find it hard to believe that the mix between commercial and open-source is good for the long-term growth, although retrospectively speaking I am very thankful to the 4fronttech for providing sound support for the Linux platform when it needed it the most and when no one else was able/willing to provide one)
wrong too, OSS used to be the native linux sound API.. (AFAIK still is, I haven't looked at 2.5)
- OSS's interest is in multiple platform support, rather than the
maximum platform-specific performance
- Finally, last time I tried OSS RME Hammerfall driver (v0.8 a couple of
days ago), nothing worked as it was supposed to (although obviously I did not give it enough of a chance, I am sure).
... well who knows, at least this way we won't find it out.
Guenter