[PlanetCCRMA] libstdc++.so.5 on RH7.3?

[Mark Knecht]

Hi Kevin,
   Thanks for the response.
Mark

>
> Hi Mark -
>
> I used to have a Hammerfall 9652 (actually, I never actually attached
> the ADAT daughter board, so it was really a Hammerfall Lite) and
> remember the lack of a mixer "element".
>
> The idea being that "all digital" cards like these should not have/need
> volume controls.  They should simply pass 1's and 0's to/from external
> hardware.

Sure, I can see that part of it, but I think that this fact has led to one
bad design choice in terms of Alsa's architecture. Since Alsa is 'bits in
become bits out, and since the card has no way to manage a channel's volume,
if you hook a Hammerfall up to a high end D/A and then a high power power
amp, you get high volume responses at times you cannot control. (Boot time,
with certain applications that do not control volume, or do it incorrectly,
etc.) I think that leaving volume control to the application only was not a
good idea, but I can understand the attraction for doing so.

I guess, in retrospect, that I openly can admit that the RME documentation
never suggests anything like a mixer for the Hammerfall series. It's just
sort of 26 in, 26 out on the hardware side, and of course, as a user, you
have no idea what is offered on the software side of the card until you buy
it, choose and OS, and start using it. In my case, this card is in a
GigaStudio application under Windows and works very well with that app.

It's only under Linux that you start to see more of the warts of the cards
you buy, and the warts of the OS and audio implementations. Don't get me
wrong, as I think Alsa is 98% great stuff, 2% uncommunucated warts. On
balance it's amazing what we get, but the 'cost' is pretty high - basically
years of just finding things out the hard way. ;-)

As I say, with the 3 cards I own, the Hammerfall doesn't have a mixer, the
Audigy has a mixer, but apparently alsamixer doesn't really cause it to mix
or it wasn't obvious to me where the mix was going, and the HDSP 9652 has a
mixer which doesn't work. Overall it's not easy to understand this
undocumented stuff.

All of that amounts to a less than clear picture about what this software is
supposed to do! ;-)

And a long learning process for me... ;-)

>
> I think there are still discussions of this in the linux-audio-user
> archive (circa 2000/1 ??) if you have an interest...but it's probably
> just me discussing my most recent cranial injury after banging my head
> on the desk trying to get the thing working!

I think I found a few of those as I was looking at this in the last day or
two. No need to relive such occurrences!

- Mark