ALSA 1.0.19 Released With Many Changes

[Thetargos]

If only competitors would manufacture a DSP chip with hardware mixing and hardware OpenAL support, Creative may actually suffer any impact. until then, they still hold much of the market (at the development phase), but that hold is quickly dissolving. Will OpenAL be allowed to mature and have different hardware implementations just like OpenGL does? I certainly hope so, I wouldn't hold my breath for this or the next year, though.

[BlackStar]

Again, the epithets are not called for. As an aside, Creative happens to be the foster parent of OpenAL at the moment, and they keep developing it from what I see. Their Vista drivers actually depend on it.

That's where my gripe with Creative lies...

[Rant warning!]

Creative treats OpenAL much like EAX: another method to tie developers and users to its proprietary hardware. They left their "sample implementation" to die (just try to use OpenAL SI on x86_64 - windows or linux, it doesn't matter!) Which is what Creative wants, actually: "hey, prefer our hardware, it's the only one with good OpenAL support!" By not providing a sample implementation, they effectively stiffle any potential competition.

Fortunately, a bright man, Chris Robinson, has single-handedly implemented what Creative will not (or cannot) do: OpenAL Soft, a fast, free software implementation of OpenAL 1.1 + extensions which works across all platforms and hardware. What's more, he keeps improving it, proposing and implementing new extensions and functionality and generally does what Creative was supposed to do: develop openal, only more efficiently and in the open.

And how does Creative respond? "Please avoid distributing OpenAL Soft" (subtext: "it would hurt our bottom line.")

One last thing: Linux will never gain EAX support (not even X-Fis!), since Creative keeps EAX3-5 proprietary. Fortunately, few games rely on EAX anymore (even Blizzard, long-time proponent, dropped it after WoW) and OpenAL EFX, EAX's successor, can be implemented by anyone incl. OpenAL Soft (at least as far as I can see.)

[mgc8]

@bulletxt: your worthless hysteria is not helping anyone, especially not the linux community. I don't know why such abusive behaviour is tolerated here, however I hope you grow up by the year 2020.

@mgc8:
Hardware wavetables are long dead. Music production now relies on virtual instruments, sequenced with MIDI, so the quality of the wavetables does not even matter. MIDI is no longer used for music distribution - and even if it was, you'd get better quality through software wavetables, anyway.

That may be true, however I still like playing old midi files. Call me oldfashioned, but they never sound as good on timidity as they do on a hardware wavetable. Also old games like Lucas adventures played in ScummVM rely on that (or some sort of emulation) to sound at their best (unless you have the CD versions around), and frankly even with FluidSynth which is better optimized it still takes one core out of a 2.4Ghz C2D to play without cracks and stutters! I know I'm probably 1% of the market here but... so are some other very familiar things

FPS hit on games? Let's say you lose 2 FPS on software sound. If you spent these 80$ on a better video card, you'd gain 10 FPS!
Better sound quality? Not if you use the digital connectors. Even if you don't, a Xonar would sound even better.

I know there really won't be a difference in sound quality per se, however I'm referring more to the crashes/pops/stutters and so on that people complain about all over the place. There used to be problems like that with Creative as well, however they're solved in recent drivers (and I play a lot of games on Vista x64 to notice). And the part about fps is not true if you already have the fastest possible card and it still isn't fast enough in certain games! Why should I buy a Xonar D1 or a _much_ more expensive Xonar D2 and suffer less FPS and more instability, plus less features to boot? Only because one company is somehow "evil"? Come on!

There really is no point in buying a Creative sound card anymore, especially given the company's notoriety for monopolistic practices and general anti-consumer behavior (bad support, bad drivers). Your money are better spent elsewhere.

I agree that Creative is a bad company and wish there was a real alternative. Noone is defending their actions, only their products (and I am sure you can perceive the difference). So is nVidia, remember? So is Apple and so is Microsoft. Logitech is also averse to Linux and they make some of the best peripherals. Seagate makes great hard-drives, yet recently they had a horrible snafu and claimed "Linux was an unsupported OS" (Oh, the idiocy!). Unless you are prepared to sacrifice _a_lot_ of personal comfort, you will buy products from at least one of these companies, and there really isn't much to do about it but try to change them to the better until our marketshare will grow to the point Linux can't be ignored anymore.

As far as Creative is concerned, at least they finally did the right thing -- their motives don't matter, and some childish behaviour of ignoring them out of spite won't help anyone. At the worst it will prove to other companies contemplating a free/open driver that the Linux community is a bunch of teenagers with superiority complexes. As I said before, I think the ALSA devs are above that and they really have a reason for not using the free source that's already out there...

That's not really an issue with modern CPU's. If you want to be a clueless gamer and reward Creative for making EAX completely closed/proprietary and patent-trolling any competing positional audio standards, then by all means, keep giving money to Creative.

Again, the epithets are not called for. As an aside, Creative happens to be the foster parent of OpenAL at the moment, and they keep developing it from what I see. Their Vista drivers actually depend on it.

All big companies are doing wrong from time to time, and it's the customers' job to yell at them when they do. It's also fair to acknowledge the rare occasions when they do the _right_ thing and work with them to increase the frequency of such.

[DanL]

until I found out that the EAX is still emulated in software so you get fps hits in games

That's not really an issue with modern CPU's. If you want to be a clueless gamer and reward Creative for making EAX completely closed/proprietary and patent-trolling any competing positional audio standards, then by all means, keep giving money to Creative.

[BlackStar]

Bulletxt, I share your sentiments about Creative, but that was uncalled for.

@mgc8:
Hardware wavetables are long dead. Music production now relies on virtual instruments, sequenced with MIDI, so the quality of the wavetables does not even matter. MIDI is no longer used for music distribution - and even if it was, you'd get better quality through software wavetables, anyway.

FPS hit on games? Let's say you lose 2 FPS on software sound. If you spent these 80$ on a better video card, you'd gain 10 FPS!

Better sound quality? Not if you use the digital connectors. Even if you don't, a Xonar would sound even better.

Lower latency for music production? Again there are much better offerings out there - X-Fi's are not really suited for this.

There really is no point in buying a Creative sound card anymore, especially given the company's notoriety for monopolistic practices and general anti-consumer behavior (bad support, bad drivers). Your money are better spent elsewhere.

[bulletxt]

don't even dare to blame ALSA developers for missing support on linux side. if there is a shitty company that does shitty drivers (even on the Windows side), that company is called CREATIVE.

and now, if you use your brain, CREATIVE released the specs(actually the drivers became GPL) only after real competition came in the market like ASUS Xonars cards... and wanna know what? they work on linux with ALSA. so

so shut up and smell the coffy. I hope ALSA supports X-fi in year 2020. now go and enjoy your wavetable card.

[mgc8]

Anyway, I can't say I feel too sorry for the uninformed sheep that keep flocking back to Creative to get screwed time and again.

People don't buy Creative cards because they are "sheep". They buy them because there _still_ is no decent offering from the competition. I actually contemplated buying an "alternative" soundcard a few months back when I upgraded my desktop machine, and Creative was in the middle of the Vista driver fiasco. I opened a thread on this forum as well. The Asus Xonar and related cards where discussed and appeared interesting, until I found out that the EAX is still emulated in software so you get fps hits in games -- all while actually paying quite a lot for a card! Yes, I know everyone is switching to Dolby/TrueHD and whatnot, but while a Creative card can support that, the competition does not support older standards as well.

Oh, and by the way -- please tell me the name of just 1 (one) other card except the SBLive/Audigy line that can support HARDWARE wavetable (preferably also in Linux) and costs the same. Just one.

So yeah, other soundcards exist but they are little more than glorified integrated chipsets, I don't really see a point in buying any such card -- with fully digital connections, there is no difference in SNR or sound quality and it all comes down to the drivers. And Creative (although with a bad track record) do have better ones than the likes of Asus...

So all this attitude about "punishing" anyone is like cutting your nose to spite your face -- it's not helping anyone and it sounds like kindergarten logic. I'd like to give the ALSA devs the benefit of the doubt and consider them above that level, even though the open-source driver has been out there for... how many months? they really don't have much in the form of an excuse anymore.

[bulletxt]

yea, what I actually meant was: if a user buys a xonar card instead of an x-fi, i'm happy because its -1 customer for creative.

as for the support in alsa, that was just a joke. but I really wouldn't put my hand on a fire saying an x-fi card will fully work as it should for october 2009....

[DanL]

you deserve this Creative.

While I agree with this sentiment, it's not Creative suffering. Those of us who follow the tech world know Creative is a monopolistic patent troll that happens to make hardware. Unfortunately, they con a lot of people into buying their hardware, mostly because they acquire or sue the competition when it threatens to play to Creative's key crowd (gamers). They also pull stunts like making Audigy/2/4 owners pay for EAX support in Vista (though pirated versions are freely available).

Anyway, I can't say I feel too sorry for the uninformed sheep that keep flocking back to Creative to get screwed time and again.

so don't be surprised really much if x-fi doesn't work in Ubuntu 9.10

The last time I checked the ALSA dev list (a while ago), at least some of the devs had actually received X-fi samples from Creative and Creative's own ALSA driver seems to work well for a lot of users. I'm guessing that an X-fi driver will show up in ALSA sooner than later.

As for OSS4, I keep up with the mailing list, and it seems like the devs there are content with the basic X-fi stereo driver (which works well for most X-fi cards). Unless someone's working on it without fanfare, they seem to have other priorities (MIDI, USB audio).

[urfe]

My microphone doens't work in ALSA 1.0.18 (I don't have the capture devices anymore). I hope 1.0.19 fixes the problem. Many HDA-Intel cards have similar problems (the .18 version was pushed via updates in Fedora).