ALSA support

[Ben Wing]

Jerry James wrote:

>Ben Wing <benwing666 at gmail.com> wrote:
>  
>
>>yes, as long as the user can override it.
>>    
>>
>
>So it seems that ALSA should be an alternative to native sound, rather
>than a type of native sound as my initial patch made it.  That way, the
>existing configure options would make it easy to not use ALSA if
>somebody so desired.  I would like to check for ALSA first, before the
>native check, to fix the problem I am experiencing.
>
>A drawback to that approach is that I'll need a new config.h symbol,
>HAVE_ALSA_SOUND, and I'll have to add "|| defined(HAVE_ALSA_SOUND)"
>clauses to the existing "defined(HAVE_NATIVE_SOUND)" clauses in sound.c.
>
>Does anybody object to this approach?
>  
>
no.  adding new config symbols is not a bug, it's a feature :) ... you 
want to have such a config symbol for any piece of code that can be 
conditionally combined in or out.  yes, perhaps to be correct alsa 
should be considered a type of native (in which case you'd have to have 
native/libaudio and native/alsa or whatever), but the user can hardly 
care about this and just doing it this way is simpler to understand, i 
think.

>Also, ALSA is capable of playing a few more formats than my detector
>detects (IEC-958, MPEG, GSM).  I know how to tell when a file is in one
>of those formats, but I don't know how to extract the bitrate and the
>number of tracks/channels in those formats.  If anybody in the audience
>has that information, please let me know.
>  
>

twould be awesome if we can play mp3 files!

ben