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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.

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skyyler a day ago | parent [-]

I find it indicative of the quality of these complaints that sound cards with mixers were brought up at all. As if that's a good reason to hate PA.

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FeepingCreature 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

	▲	toast0 19 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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)

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GauntletWizard 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

[1] https://oldbytes.space/@bloopmuseum