OSSes for Courses#

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 18:30:54 +0000

I'd like to talk today about the state of audio output APIs that are implemented on Linux and accessible to Ruby, but there aren't any.

That's an oversimplification, I know. Oliver is now quite happily streaming PCM data to my headphones, so it's not even a good oversimplification. But whereas any of portaudio, pulseaudio, jack or alsa are the conventionally accepted routes to getting the speakers to squeak, what did I end up using? OSS. Yes, that's right, the Evil! Bad Deprecated! API invented by proprietary coders and left unmaintained for years that doesn't even support AC3-encoded 7.1 HDMI audio with reverse-phased channels and unlimited software mixing. Because ... well, because it Just Works. Open a file, send it a few ioctls for sample format and rate, and for the all-important "we don't care about latency that much" switch that lets interpreted code keep up without stuttering, then just chuck PCM data at it until we're out of PCM data. And it's quite well documented, and because it's all file-based it plays nice with Ruby's green threads: I just set the dsp stream to non-blocking mode and the audio keeps on going even while it's serving HTML and doing JSON calls.

Let me know when the massive ALSA DLL - or any of the plethora of other Modern audio libraries - becomes that simple to use (and preferably becomes usable without resorting to C), and I might give them another go. Yes, I am aware that under the hood the OSS API is implemented using ALSA drivers: how ironic.

Oh well. This isn't supposed to be the computer contrarian's blog, but some days it just feels like it.

http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=alsa+audio&word2=oss+audio