[clue-tech] SFD 2008.

[Jed S. Baer]

On Thu, 18 Sep 2008 21:15:43 -0600
David L. Anselmi wrote:

> Michael S. Farnsworth wrote:
> > 1. How the @#!$ to get ALSA/Jack/anything working to be able to do
> > playback with Noteedit or Rosegarden music notation.
> 
> I don't know what those are, or much about sound.  (A long time ago I 
> put ALSA on an LFS system, so I learned it then and it worked well.
> But since then whatever Debian gave me only ever required tweaking the 
> volume on the speakers.)

Coincidentally, LWN posted an article today about how Linux sound is a
mess. Subscription only, so I didn't get to read it. I assume LWN
subscribers know all about where to get it, so I won't post the URL,
since it does no good for non-subscribers.

Anyways, I hear various things about sound on Linux, and it seems to be
very much a YMMV proposition. Basic playback of media just works, at
least IMHO. And I've read various articles about how cool SoftSynth
proggies work, etc., but I infer you have to know what you're doing with
Jack to really get good use from them. And then there's the supported
sound card thing. IIRC, Alan Cox has had some harsh words for ESD. If
you're a KDE user, there's the whole ARTS framework, which I ignore,
don't know what it does, don't care at this point.

Also, there's the up-and-coming PulseAudio framework. I guess it's
supposed to be the answer to the various complaints about all the other
audio frameworks. So far, I've just avoided it, because ALSA does me just
fine.

All-in-all, I think it's likely more confusing for n00bs (like me, when
it comes to signal processing) than it could be. But there are a lot of
people working on a lot of stuff.

jed