[AD] ALSA aka: I knew it wasn't just me :o

[Thomas Fjellstrom <tfjellstrom@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Pretty decent article on the current state of linux sound
http://insanecoding.blogspot.com/2009/06/state-of-sound-in-linux-not-so-
sorry.html

I particularly like this bit>
 
ALSA - Hard to use, most developers I spoke to dislike it, poorly documented, 
not available anywhere but Linux. Some developers however prefer it, as they 
feel it gives more power than OSS API. I personally spent 3 hours trying to 
make heads or tails out of the documentation and add sound to an application. 
Then I found sound only worked on the machine I was developing on, and had to 
spend another hour going over the docs and tweaking my code to get it working 
on both machines I ended up testing on at the time. Finally, I released my 
application with the ALSA back-end, to find several people complaining about 
no sound, and started receiving patches from several developers. Many of those 
patches fixed sound on their machine, but broke sound on one of my machines. 
Here we are a year later, and my application after many hours wasted by 
several developers, ALSA now seems to output sound decently on all machines 
tested, but I sure don't trust it. We as developers don't need these kinds of 
issues. Of course, you're free to disagree, and even cite examples how you 
figured out the documentation, added sound quickly, and have it work 
flawlessly everywhere by everyone who tested your application. I must just be 
stupid.

-- 
Thomas Fjellstrom
tfjellstrom@xxxxxxxxxx