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Date:      Fri, 02 Feb 2001 17:52:19 +0000
From:      Orion Hodson <O.Hodson@cs.ucl.ac.uk>
To:        Christopher Masto <chris@netmonger.net>
Cc:        Cameron Grant <gandalf@vilnya.demon.co.uk>, Andre Albsmeier <andre.albsmeier@mchp.siemens.de>, cshenton@uucom.com, questions@FreeBSD.ORG, multimedia@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: 4.2R pcm/sbc AWE records noise, not audio: 16 bit bug?; gus broken?
Message-ID:  <1216.981136339@cs.ucl.ac.uk>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 02 Feb 2001 10:35:04 EST." <20010202103500.A3028@netmonger.net>

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<20010202103500.A3028@netmonger.net>Christopher Masto writes:
> On Fri, Feb 02, 2001 at 12:19:31PM -0000, Cameron Grant wrote:
> > to be quite honest, i've done very little but sound stuff for the last
> > decade, and attitudes like yours only contribute to my feelings of
> > dissatisfaction with it.  i feel honour-boud to finish what i started, and
> > probably will, but you should remember that i'm not being paid for this, so
> > i don't feel that you are in a position to make statements like those.  do
> > feel free to take the torch, i've been wanting to pass it on for a while
> > now.
> 
> Ok, my message was inappropriately rude.  I was in a bad mood at the time.
> 
> On the other hand, I don't think I should have to take over
> development or buy you a bunch of sound cards just to keep things
> working.  I am a programmer, and I know all too well the temptation to
> say "this old code sucks, and I'm going to rewrite it from scratch".
> I also understand that interfaces change, and sometimes it has to be
> rewritten.  And I know that "legacy" usually means "I can't wait to
> drop support for this". I don't blame you personally for the
> situation.  I'm trying to be honest here about the facts as I have
> experienced them, not to attack or insult you.

The changes in sound architecture are by no means arbitrary - it
really needed work to support more recent audio h/w (pci/ac97).  The
sound driver architecture that Cameron has put in place is excellent.
If you ever consider writing a driver and look at what other platforms
offer you'll really appreciate this.  It's clean and it's modular;
adding new audio drivers is relatively straightforward as a result.
It is unfortunate that support for some of the ISA cards got broken in
the process, but there's also the tragedy that none of owners of said
h/w has motivation to investigate.  IMHO, we are in a better position
with what we have now than before the ISA stuff broke.

> Maybe we could use a list of known good/bad sound cards and chips and
> where they can be found.  I'd replace my AWE64 if I knew what was the
> best supported card.  On the laptop though, I don't have that option.

This is an excellent idea - perhaps something along the lines of the
ALSA soundcard matrix with tested h/w and s/w configurations.  I can
vouch for SB16PCI working very nicely in 4.x boxes, and CS4281 and
CMI8x38 (though the drivers for these are not yet in the tree). 

Kind Regards
- Orion.


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