ALSA 1.0.17-rc1 Released

[deanjo]

Ahem, I was only pointing out the fact that no-one spelled deprecate correctly

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/depreciate

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/deprecate

deprecate is very different from depreciate

Nice try though

[Louise]

So PulseAudio is a set of filters on top of ALSA?

[NeoBrain]

Ahem, I was only pointing out the fact that no-one spelled deprecate correctly

Depending on what he wanted to say it could also be 'depreciate'...
The word isn't that much a part of my active english vocabulary (I'm german) and thus I looked it up. However, I then got mislead by Louise and wrote that one wrong, too
So, either deprecate or depreciate.
Point is, PulseAudio weakens ALSA in such a way that you lose many benefits as e.g. surround sound and single sound chanel (e.g. bass) adjustment because PA doesn't support them yet.

EDIT: okay, the depreciate-deprecate thing has actually been said already above I see...
strange how many posts get submitted while you're writing an own answer :/

[NeoBrain]

So PulseAudio is a set of filters on top of ALSA?

If an application requests sound output e.g. via ARTS, the request first is led to the pulseaudio-ARTS backend. Then, the pulseaudio server is contacted which (maybe after some software mixing) redirects the sound data to the actual sound system in use, e.g. ALSA.
I don't know if this description is completely accurate and correct, but it gives quite a good understanding of what's going on when PA is used, I hope.

EDIT: Oh yeah, and the point of PulseAudio is to make all applications able to use one sound system, even when they were written for a different one than the one in use. I.e. ARTS, ESD, Jack, OSS, etc. applications can be run using ALSA-only.

[Regenwald]

surround sound in pa?
read this...

http://blogs.gnome.org/rodrigo/2008/06/05/pulseaudio-in-opensuse/

[NeoBrain]

surround sound in pa?
read this...
http://blogs.gnome.org/rodrigo/2008/...o-in-opensuse/

Ah okay, then they finally got it. However, with this you still can't adjust the bass volume and I really don't like it that I have to turn my music that loud to understand anything that the whole house can hear my bass
I'm better off using plain ALSA anyways, works like a charm

[d2kx]

No Creative X-Fi support? Great! This company has become a real joke. For those that have read the news some weeks ago, daniel_k has been threatened by Creative, again. As much as I like my Audigy 2 ZS, especially with the better snd_emu10k1 driver when compared to the official Creative Windows driver, I will not buy a card from them again. I'd recommend the ASUS Xonar DX 7.1 for PCIe which does not cost too much.

[etymxris]

What I'd really like to see is AC3 real time encoding actually work without sputtering constantly, and support software mixing. I'm really surprised more people don't ask for this feature equivalent to "Dolby Digital Live." It's the only way to get a surround signal out of your digital out port except for DVDs that have already encoded the audio.

[deanjo]

What I'd really like to see is AC3 real time encoding actually work without sputtering constantly, and support software mixing. I'm really surprised more people don't ask for this feature equivalent to "Dolby Digital Live." It's the only way to get a surround signal out of your digital out port except for DVDs that have already encoded the audio.

Well you can do it, It requires the use of Jack but it does work. The reason you won't see it in linux distro's is simply because of the patent issues with it, the same reasons why you don't see bundled mp3 support with most major distro's "out of the box".

http://essej.net/ac3jack/

[Jimmy]

Like ATI, until it works, I won't buy Creative again. Also, ATI/AMD is much more on the bandwagon than Creative, and I'm not on the ATI wagon yet.

The only reason I have ATI and Creative hardware is because they worked well enough on Windows. Now that I use a Linux OS they just aren't viable choices despite all the evangelism.