[alsa-devel] Only one element for multichannel mixer controls please!

[Jaroslav Kysela]

On Mon, 27 Oct 2008, Takashi Iwai wrote:

> And, the current smixer abstraction sucks.  Really.

Because we do not have any abstraction available at this moment. The 
smixer API is not bad itself, it's just about internal alsa-lib code and 
how to implement abstraction layers. Also, for applications using PCM 
devices we need to add two functions handling all used channels like this:

/* for PCM stream volume control */
int snd_pcm_mixer_element(snd_pcm_t *pcm, snd_mixer_t *mixer, snd_mixer_elem_t **elem);
/* for Master volume control - will not be available for recording */
int snd_pcm_mixer_master(snd_pcm_t *pcm, snd_mixer_t *mixer, snd_mixer_elem_t **elem);

My idea is to describe the correlations between PCM and mixer in the 
standard .conf files defining PCM devices.

The internal smixer interface can be extended using dynamic C library now, 
but the question is, who will write C modules for all cards. I also
prepared python interface to allow fast smixer prototyping. Another 
possibility is to create a C module which will parse a text configuration
file describing the abstaction.

					Jaroslav

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Jaroslav Kysela <perex at perex.cz>
Linux Kernel Sound Maintainer
ALSA Project, Red Hat, Inc.