Tada!

Why is it so hard to get basic sound working on Linux? And by basic I mean I want to be able to watch porn and play an mp3 to cover the sounds at at the same time. Or I want to be able to play iTunes inside a windows VMware VM and hear my mail notifier on my host tell me that one of you has written another asshat comment.

And don't tell me "it works now!" Because it doesn't. I just tried it.

The number of moving parts in Linux's audio stack is just plain inexcusable. OSS, ALSA, dmix, esd, arts, pulseaudio, jack, nas. On top of that you have libraries that that can talk to one or many of these systems: libaio, libasound, phonon, gstreamer. And why have KDE and Gnome for the past 10 years not been able to agree on how to play sound, or configure sound? Linux is about choice right? What if I choose something other than KDE or Gnome? do I lose? Is my only choice to have someone earfuck me so hard that I go deaf and I don't have to worry about it anymore? Maybe what they meant to say is Linux is only ready for my grandma, because she can't hear anything anyway?

Each of these systems and libraries probably had some reason to be created. But you know what, fuck those reasons, because whatever they added or fixed, they certainly broke more. And after 10 years, we still don't have a baseline that works for me. I don't think I'm asking for much here. Works for you? Sweet dude. That really makes me feel better about having to listen to my case fans. It gives me a glimmer of hope that I could spend three more weekends trying to get it to work.

Why do I care if my sound system can add arbitrary filters and effects to my system ding? (And for the record, some Creative card way back when could do this on Windows, the first one based on the EMU101K. I made my computer sound like it was in a sewer tunnel. It was totally awesome. Then 10 minutes later I turned it off and wondered why I spent an extra $30 on that feature) Why do I care if I can stream sound over to another computer if a program can't make a sound in under 100ms from when it needs to on my own machine?

And please, if you're gonna tell me about emulation layers, don't. I know all about them. Anyone who has tried to program anything will know that emulation layers always suck. You always lose something. For example the OSS to alsa emulation layer makes dmix not work. Sweet, why did I want ALSA again? So I could bang my head on the wall trying to figure out it's programming language-like config file? And besides, where's my OSS to phonon layer? Cuz I totally need that. Don't I? I don't know anymore. Maybe I'll go crazy and start hearing sounds. Problem fixed.