I was thinking in the shower this morning and realized that my public interfaces to libao are fairly annoying. Why make the application keep track of the driver function table *and* the device state. If real life is any indication, groups of items tend to get separated and lost. I should just make generic wrapper functions that take device id's (think file id's) returned by the ao_open function, lookup the associated function table, and call the right function.

Does this sound familiar? I should have looked at the standard UNIX open() and write() functions. Doh! Reminder to self: Never forget precedent. If UNIX programmers like it, it can't be that bad. :) (I'm sure someone in the audience will have issues with that one.)

Anyway, I've started installing ALSA onto a spare Linux box I have at work. Once I get the hang of it (and get it to work with my AWE32 card), I'll write an ALSA driver for libao. Still waiting for someone (Monty) to tell me how I should get this package into the vorbis tree. Maybe my last email was unclear. (Or maybe Monty is clairvoyant and knows that I needed to fix my code.)