http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2007-October/msg00136.html
"Of the big distros only that spaceboy distro doesn't love us anymore as it seems, as I haven't heard from them in a while"
"And gnome-volume-control which is much sexier UI-wise (i18n, ...), but exposes a lot of cruft we'd prefer to get rid of (i.e. all kinds of stupid alsa mixer tracks and checkboxes nobody really understands, shows every devices thrice, ...)"
"It's enabled by default in F8 and redirects all ALSA audio to PA -- unless some borked app hard codes "hw:0" as device name."
"Regarding hardware mixing support: this is bullshit. You know, a while back all sound cards had wavetable stuff built in hw. And then this became obsolete - because it could be done with less effort and without problems in software, with faster CPUs. Then, there where MPEG decoder cards which soonishly became obsolete -- because it could be done with less effor in software, with faster CPUs. <...> But honestly, the next one who comes up with the hw mixing issue should please do his homework and read up what happened in sound card design in the last 10 years, thank you very much. Asking for hw mixing in PA is like asking for support for MPEG decoder cards in GST."
"Oh, and sound is not really life-depending, is it? If you lose audio on your desktop all you lose is a bit of background music, it's not that PA eats all your files for breakfast."
"So, to the next big technical issue Gustavo found in PA: he thinks its developers are stubborn. Thank you very much, Gustavo, I love you too. Maybe it is you that is stubborn here, with spreading all this FUD?"
"(Just as a side note: do you know that Takashi, the upstream ALSA maintainer also maintains PA in Suse? Maybe you're more Catholic than the Pope in your insistance on ALSA dmix?)"
"Frederic still loves ESD. ESD is bad, in latency, in features, in code, in everything. I am not sure if you, Frederic, noticed that ESD only supports 2ch, 16bit, 44khz audio. Have you noticed all those 5.1 sound systems popping all around you? Have you noticed that everyone hates esd? And that the most well known trick to get your audio working on your Linux desktop is called "killall esd"? Noone wants to maintain ESD -- do you? There are just so many reasons why ESD should be obsoleted... Dude, the next one who seriously suggests ESD as our path to the future in desktop I audio I will personally buy a ticket for a time machine, so he can fast-forward for 10 years or so and join the rest of us in 2007!"
"There's a lot of stuff you want to do in a sound server. For example: policy decisions like "everytime I plug in my USB headset in I want all voip playback streams to automcatically switch to it, and everytime i start my voip app i want its stream to go through the usb headset". Then, doing all this kind of "compiz for audio" stuff."
"PA in F8 should not drop out, unless you configure it manually to some strange settings. If you ship a shitty HZ=100-with-no-preemption kernel, then yes, this increases the chance of a drop-out. But really, if you want to shoot yourself in the foot then go for it, but don't blame PA for it, don't do it the ESR way."
"And again: no modern sound card supports hw mixing anymore. That's the past, get over it."
"Regarding event sounds: Yes, I disable them too by default, I think everyone reasonable (except davidz, maybe :-)) does that. But why do we do that? Partly because the sounds we have right now in GNOME suck big time and are annoying like hell. And partly, because they are truggered far too often. If you ever used a MacOS machine you probably know that the event sounds there are lot more subtle and ... useful."
"when you get an email a human voice should say something like "You've got mail", instead of some stupid "ding" sound noone knows what it means."
