Comment by FeepingCreature 9 days ago
Yeah pulseaudio was like "you need this so you can have two apps playing music at the same time" entirely ignoring the existence of sound cards with mixers or the alsa soft mixer. Similarly, systemd was hyped at the time for, among others, allowing parallel service start entirely ignoring the several init systems that were already managing parallel start quite happily.
No, I hate PA cause it didn't work properly to the end. (Pipewire was better day 1 than PA ever was.) I just think that "you absolutely need PA to have multiple apps playing sound" was always nonsense, and the same sort of nonsense that was used to push systemd.
Yeah, that was total nonsense. Good cards existed. And if you didn't have a good card, alsa had a soft mixer. FreeBSD added a softmixer to OSS, too, so you didn't even need alsa. Worst case, you could run the Enlightenment sound daemon without Enlightenment and it was compact and just worked (as long as you had a simple sound setup)
I'm always happy to discuss sound cards with mixers, though! As a supporter of the Bloop Museum[1], I think that the "What might have been" if we had dedicated hardware for playing dozens or hundreds of sound files at a time is an interesting question. There's a lot of experimentation in the audio space that has kind of died out, because audio is so cheap - While over in in graphics, we're still seeing interesting advancements and dead ends.
This turned out to be entirely the right approach, though, and it was probably pretty obvious even at the time. Sound Cards with built in mixers have all but died out. Everything they did has been eaten by software,
Even at the time, few games used an API where they managed multiple channels directly; Software mixing was commonplace from the 90s. Any game that wanted to play battle sounds was not relying on the mere 6-8 channels that cards from that time could handle.
Our modern Pipewire based workflow is remarkably simple and remarkably effective, and it's significantly an evolution of PA.