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Re: esound [was: Re: Non-related 'Recommends' dependencies - bug or not?]



Hi Klaus,

Klaus Ethgen [2008-06-17 10:12 +0100]:
> I cannot prove that. Its sound quality is much better than the one of
> ALSA direct. (Well esd on top of OSS. It is not that good than with OSS
> direct but it is ok.)

Hm, that rather sounds like for your card the OSS driver is much
better than the ALSA one. But OSS/ALSA both live below the application
level (where esound/pulseaudio/arts reside).

> > (huge A/V desync when playing videos, etc.),
> 
> I just see that issues when using ALSA. So please drop ALSA and not ESD.

On the vast majority of systems out there, esound plays through ALSA.
The kernel only has very few OSS-only drivers left, and gradually
shifts towards ALSA only.

Since ALSA is the kernel ABI (of course it has userspace libraries,
too), and esound is the user session daemon, it's not really an
'either or' here. The alternative to esound is not really ALSA, but
rather pulseaudio.

> > The only thing I know which really still needs the esound interface is
> > libgnome, for the sound events.
> 
> There are other needs.
> - The sound hardware do only support one bitrate and you need something
>   between to scale the bitrate.
> - You want to have sound mixing and do not want to use ARTS (Which is
>   mud).

Then IMHO you should use Pulseaudio nowadays. However, gstreamer and
other infrastructure never really made bitrate/frequency conversion an
issue with direct ALSA output. YMMV.

> > At least in my personal experience, using ALSA directly (which has had
> > dmix enabled by default for years) gives much better results.
> 
> My experience is complete opposite. ALSA is that kind of buggy. If you
> move the mouse while using sound on ALSA you hear cracks and sound
> disorders. Also they halfly translate the config files!!! And then I was
> not able to use it long time as it makes my systems complete instable
> and it ops all time. (Tested on kernel 2.4.*, 2.6.* and also with debian
> kernels or vanilla. And on all distros, Stable, Unstable or testing.)

That's interesting indeed! So you avoid that by using an OSS driver
instead of the ALSA one? I can really not imagine how esound on top of
a broken ALSA driver would sound better than just using the ALSA
output directly?

Thanks,

Martin

-- 
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)

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