Many Sound Updates Queued For Linux 3.19 Kernel

[david_lynch]

Linux's sound subsystem is still stuck n the 90s. Sure it's fine for listening to music watching movies. But as soon as you need to some low latency playback/recording or want to utilize your card card's hardware acceleration, you're either out of luck or you have to jump through hoops.

Nah, sound on Linux just works for 99% of users. You might have some weird little corner case there, but it would be a big mistake to somehow jump to the conclusion that Linux is stuck in the 90s.

[slacka]

Nah, sound on Linux just works for 99% of users.... a big mistake to somehow jump to the conclusion that Linux is stuck in the 90s.

The sound subsystem is NOT Linux. And I said "it's fine for listening to music or watching movies". Just like it was back in the 90s. Back then I used it for CU-SeeMe videoconferencing and listened to that breakfast at tiffany's MP3 that popped in the beginning on slackware box. And yes, that's fine for 99% of the users, but it still doesn't make it a modern sound system like Windows and Mac OS have. PulseAudio and JACK do help cover over the warts, but the system is broken and full of technical debit.

Wayland will give us a modern composited desktop. Valve, Google, or Redhat will eventually bring the sound system up to modern standards too.

[slacka]

I hear you about Linux idiosyncrasies, but as far as JACK specifically is concerned, it becomes much easier if you use a dedicated management tool like Cadence. QjackCtl gets the job done, but Cadence gets the job done smoothly and easily.

For professional audio production (or as close as you'll get under Linux anyway), you will probably want to install a dedicated distribution like KXStudio. It comes with the latest and shiniest versions of LMMS, Ardour, Rosegarden and such, a real-time kernel, and pretty much just works out of the box. It also comes with a bunch of utilities, in particular hosts for LADSPA, LV2 and Linux VST plug-ins. Virtual instruments like the absurdly awesome PianoTeq work flawlessly. (Running Windows VSTs in, say, LMMS's Wine emulation, often works okay too, although it's more hit and miss.)

It's become possible to do pretty neat stuff using only Linux. But yeah, it's been a long road, and the road ahead is longer still.

Agreed. If I ever get back into it, I'll go with a distro like KXStudio. Part of the fun is getting it going, but after you've done it once, you just want it to work. And yes, all great software.

[pal666]

The sound subsystem is NOT Linux. And I said "it's fine for listening to music or watching movies". Just like it was back in the 90s. Back then I used it for CU-SeeMe videoconferencing and listened to that breakfast at tiffany's MP3 that popped in the beginning on slackware box. And yes, that's fine for 99% of the users, but it still doesn't make it a modern sound system like Windows and Mac OS have. PulseAudio and JACK do help cover over the warts, but the system is broken and full of technical debit.

Wayland will give us a modern composited desktop. Valve, Google, or Redhat will eventually bring the sound system up to modern standards too.

no, back in the 90s there was no plugin bluetooth or usb audio. and simultaneous audio in several apps was not really working.

btw, your rant lacks any details, what is missing from pa and jack to make it non broken

[V10lator]

The sound subsystem is NOT Linux.

So the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) isn't (a part of) Linux?

[nanonyme]

no, back in the 90s there was no plugin bluetooth or usb audio. and simultaneous audio in several apps was not really working.

btw, your rant lacks any details, what is missing from pa and jack to make it non broken

Sound in several apps totally worked in the 90's unless you were a cheapskate who didn't buy a proper sound card with hardware mixing

[Zan Lynx]

Linux's sound subsystem is still stuck n the 90s. Sure it's fine for listening to music watching movies. But as soon as you need to some low latency playback/recording or want to utilize your card card's hardware acceleration, you're either out of luck or you have to jump through hoops.

I suppose that things like the RME Hammerfall cards and dedicated audio processor boards running real-time Linux don't count?

No, your standard desktop Linux distro won't install the software for this. But it is out there and runs on Linux just fine. Much better than Windows or OSX when using the Linux real-time patches.

Here's an example I found Googling.

There are more. I remember reading about one designed for mixing and recording live events back in 2007 or so that used AMD X2 chips and CoreBoot to avoid proprietary BIOSes with SMM interrupts. SMM absolutely kills real-time processing. However, my Googling couldn't find that system.