[ANNOUNCE] New Mixer Handling in PA 0.9.16/F12

Jeff Garzik jgarzik at pobox.com
Wed Jul 29 10:48:42 UTC 2009


Karel Zak wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 10:07:32PM +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote:
>> On Tue, 28.07.09 15:48, Bill Nottingham (notting at redhat.com) wrote:
>> Yes. You cannot select them as record source, you cannot mute or
>> unmute them, you cannot change their volume. "CD", "PC Speaker",
>> "MIDI" and so on are just obsolete. 
> 
> This reminds me your note:
> 
>     https://tango.0pointer.de/pipermail/pulseaudio-discuss/2009-July/004519.html
> 
>     PA does not make use of hardware mixing. And I don't plan to change
>     that. It's obsolete technology. CPUs these days come with extensions
>     such as MMX or SSE precisely for speeding up DSP tasks such as PCM
>     mixing. This is way more flexible that hw mixing, and definitely the
>     way to the future, both on the desktop and on embedded envs as well.
> 
> 
> The "obsolete technology" -- who made this decision? Is it your private
> opinion or any suggestion from sound card manufacturers?
> 
> It seems that HW companies still produce the "obsolete technology".

Quite agreed [says a former kernel audio driver maintainer], and I will 
go even farther:

It is completely stupid to waste host CPU on a task that can be 
offloaded in parallel to dedicated audio hardware.

If the user intentionally purchased expensive audio hardware with nice 
hardware mixing, do not subvert the user's intentions by ignoring such 
nice hardware.

Any developer who claims "always use software mixing" or "always use 
hardware mixing" is a young, inexperienced fool.  There are valid 
situations for both choices.

	Jeff






More information about the fedora-devel-list mailing list