Re:Linus: “I no longer feel like I can trust ‘init’ to do th...
by int_19h on Monday July 10, 2017 @03:57AM
(#14734114)
The amusing part is that FreeBSD is still on OSS, and it "just works" - and they let multiple apps play audio at the same time simply by opening the same device. It's been that way... I don't even remember how long, but I think it was already there 15 years ago?
Re:Linus: “I no longer feel like I can trust ‘init’ to do th...
by clarry on Monday July 10, 2017 @05:38AM
(#14734527)
And OpenBSD introduced its own userspace daemon for mixing multiple audio streams together. The by-then already existing libsndio would then just default to opening the socket provided by that daemon. So, the change was transparent to applications (no code changes, they already used libsndio) and users (no configuration, at least for people running defaults) and didn't cause years of grief, agony, churn, hatred, and shitstorm.
Of course you can still trivially disable the daemon and you lose software mixing & resampling, but things that work within these limits will run ok. But there really shouldn't ever be need to disable it, it just works.
The sndio api is pretty damn nice & simple too. https://man.openbsd.org/sio_open.3
Also had issues with bluetooth, as you seem to have. I will permit the idea that this is possibly unrelated (bluez is garbage, yes), but bluetooth audio was working for me previously, and only broke when pulse entered the picture.
FWIW from an API perspective I still think OSS seems better than ALSA... Linux audio seems to be a repeated case of people confusing interface with implementation, and the interface only ever gets more complex.