Mysteries of sound in Fedora-9

[stan]

Timothy Murphy wrote:

[snip]

I can't help you with your specific problem, but I wanted to comment on
your observation below.
> Multimedia and in particular Sound is easily the weakest chain
> in Fedora, and has been for several versions of Fedora.
> The whole Sound system is absurdly complicated,
> and disentangling it is like eating spaghetti.
>   
I've been observing the sound arena for a while now, and I think the
problem is that not enough resources are committed to it.  Alsa itself is
sort of like X for video.  A low level interface to build sound applications
on.  It seems to work reasonably well given the handicaps.  There are
dozens of sound card vendors as opposed to 3 video card vendors.  The
specs for the sound cards are often not released or require proprietary
firmware to run correctly.  So the spaghetti you perceive is just a true
reflection of the underlying reality, the soundcard universe is like 
spaghetti.
Alsa will let you do just about anything with your sound device, but the
learning curve is steep.

What I think is missing is the equivalent of Gnome and KDE as desktop
managers for sound to hide this reality.  Pulseaudio seems to be the 
beginnings of this
higher level control.  But it is still in the early stages.  Give it a 
few years
and it will probably be ubiquitous if it gets the resources.  Sound is an
end user function, not a server function, and while linux is functional 
as a
desktop, the target seems to be more towards servers.  So sound isn't
a priority for the development process, unlike X which even servers
use for administration.
> I'd like to say to the Fedora and KDE sound teams,
> "Please don't add or subtract anything
> until you have properly documented what is already there.
> Try adding some test files, and check that your error messages
> are comprehensible, with advice on what steps to take."
>
>   
I don't think sound should be a Gnome or KDE thing, it should be a
sound thing they utilize.  That is, they paste their own  look and feel
on something like pulse to make it fit within their desktop concept.
Maybe they preconfigure and simplify so you just drag and drop or
select from menus.