[ANNOUNCE] New Mixer Handling in PA 0.9.16/F12

Lennart Poettering mzerqung at 0pointer.de
Wed Jul 29 13:24:08 UTC 2009


On Wed, 29.07.09 06:48, Jeff Garzik (jgarzik at pobox.com) wrote:

>
> 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:

Maybe since the times you worked on audio drivers the design of the
sound cards changed a little and stuff like SSE became largely available?

> 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.

Hear hear, Mr. Garzik is the the old experienced wise man of audio,
who knows so much more about audio than any of the audio guys at
Microsoft or Apple.

Happy to take patches.

Lennart

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




More information about the fedora-devel-list mailing list