ALSA == EVIL
 

To anyone who is considering installing ALSA onto their linux system: don't, it's not worth the trouble. ESD works heaps better while allowing multiple processes to access your sound card.

The story:

So I keep reading about ALSA.. xmms supports it, mplayer suggests it (when it says my system is too slow to play a file, one of the suggestions is "try using ALSA"). It seems to be the next great thing for linux audio. Fair enough.. I'm happy w/ my ESD but maybe it'd be even cooler.

First, I tried freshrpms.net to install the RH9 rpms for it (I run RH9). No go. That's OK, I can compile it myself. I'm not a guru, but I know some stuff.

I refer to the ALSA page for my sound card as I'm going through this. Configuration, make, make install works great for alsa-driver, alsa-lib, and alsa-utils.

Then we get to modprobe (I didn't want to recompile my kernel w/ it). I spend a good hour trying to figure out why it says it can't detect my sound card. I kill'd esd, I did a lsof on /dev/dsp... no results.. what the fuck? Going through my dmesg output.. I see it giving me a bunch of errors saying it doesn't exist. Just as I'm about to give up.. there's the answer.. the normal (OSS?) driver is installed. :rolleyes: DOAH! That's 50% my fault, 50% ALSA page's fault for not saying I need to uninstall my current driver (I'm a total newbie to ALSA). I thought it sat on top of OSS like ESD or aRts.

Now to my main complaint. It's shit! The sound doesn't come out correctly, it screws up xmms's little bar/line thing that goes with the music, and it's OSS emulation (which Gaim would use since I can't run it and ESD together) is total crap (and it's apparently better than OSS).

Now, some of my frustration is my fault (especially the installing driver part)... but the rest just pisses me off that I wasted my time on something that's crap.

Anyone have any better experiences, or used it at all?

Oh, a summary of this story with faces:

I :love: the current setup I have.. but I thought ":cool:" about trying ALSA.. something new to play with. So I start and everything works fine :)... but wait.. modprobe doesn't work :( :eek: one hour later.. still :hmm: and :confused: about it all... then I realise what I did... I :lol: :D and :rolleyes: at myself and fix the problem.... go for a reboot for good measure.. into my system fine.. no errors on startup :p... feeling pretty proud of myself :suave:.. then I find out the sound is fucking shit quality :mad: :|

ALSA can :icare: my ass. I give it an opposite of a :thumbsup:. It can :o (that's blow) me.

There.. that's every face.. except one...
;).

wow i was confused until you got into the face story. now i understand, i'll never get ALSA, whew :D

ALSA works wonders. ESD is getting old and deprecated, and if you want a userspace sound manager, use ARTS from KDE.

ALSA and ESD are totally different domains, and besides, ALSA after 2.6+ will be taking over the OSS modules which are, not really oftenly, updated.

As far as your shitty sound it sounds like a deeper problem and not ALsA related. Thats usually a problem with IRQ or DMA, as ALSA uses a more direct method of access than OSS modules.

You sound like a fan of ALSA..

The sound controller is on-board and my driver (intel_8x0) doesn't have options for DMA or IRQ. I'm not sure how much I can change. Do you think my problems come from ALSA itself or the way the programs (xmms) talk to it (using ALSA as your output plugin)? I've been blaming ALSA itself.

Thanks.

I use the same driver for my Abit nforce2 board (NF7-S).

ALSA works great for me. I use gentoo, maybe their ALSA page can give you some insight? http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/alsa-guide.xml