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A comment on Mutable Instruments' Eurorack Modules. Parent comment

Re:Mutable Instruments' Eurorack Modules by klodolph on Friday February 28, 2020 @11:07AM (#22443706)
ALSA may not have changed, but programs variously have used ALSA, ESD, JACK, OSS, PulseAudio, and aRts. Depending on your hardware, some of these options have been variously unusable at points--too many developers assume that you have a hardware mixer, for example, which is true for standard PC audio output but not true for any pro interface I have ever used (even the dirt cheap ones). At various points, I ended up with audio that only worked with exclusive access. I tolerated it for a while but now I consider it a dealbreaker.

I'm 100% willing to pay Apple to make this problem go away for me. Core Audio is an amazing API.

For cannot export in standard formats--talking about MusicXML. Until a couple of years ago I also had problems listening to music on my Linux system; I think it was because of some patent licensing issue.

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Re:Mutable Instruments' Eurorack Modules by PaulDavisThe1st on Friday February 28, 2020 @09:00PM (#22448193)
All of the above APIs except ALSA run on top of ALSA, except OSS which was deprecated more than 20 years ago. The CoreAudio API has changed just as much in that time period.. there are huge chunks of the CoreAudio API that existed back in 1999 that no longer work or even exist.

Also, note you can't use the audio APIs from macOS "classic" on macOS/OS X (and never could - Apple banned it from the start, so every single audio app that existed for macs pre OS X had to have its audio I/O completely rewritten. Apple didn't pay for this - 3rd party developers did).

I write pro-audio/music creation software for a living, and I can assure you that from this perspective, CoreAudio is definitely not an amazing API. That's without even taking into account the differences between CoreAudio on iOS and macOS.

The only Linux distributions that had problems playing patent-protected formats over the last 20 years were the ones that stuck to a strictly libre software policy. If you picked one of them (e.g. Debian), it's hardly Linux' fault that you chose a distribution one of whose raison d'etre's was to exclude any non-free formats of any kind. I used RedHat starting in 1997 and it never had a problem playing mp3 files.

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