Linux audio sucks

because of bugs in drivers, libraries, and applications. Here are some of them. They are quite real, because they interfere with my not-so-unrealistic requirements (play music through headphones connected to the onboard HD audio chip, make some noise with the PC speaker when someone calls me via SIP, and copy sound from my TV tuner to the HD audio chip when I watch TV).

• In a driver. Take, for example, saa7134-alsa (a kernel module that allows recording audio from SAA713X-based TV tuners). It advertises support for the following sample rates: 32 kHz and 48 kHz. What it fails to mention is that it doesn't support recording at 48 kHz except for the case of "original SAA7134 with the MIXER_ADDR_LINE2 capture source". In all other cases (e.g., SAA7133 with the MIXER_ADDR_TVTUNER capture source), it gives out 32 kHz samples, but mislabels them as 48 kHz. Thus, applications such as MPlayer have to be configured to use only the 32 kHz sample rate. Not a big problem if such configuration is possible (i.e.: if not using PulseAudio together with HAL), but still a bug.
• In the ALSA library. Today I discovered that the PC speaker at home no longer plays ring tones in SIP clients. It did work before, but I can no longer find a working revision. While testing this sound device with speaker-test, I found this floating point exception inside the ALSA library.
• In applications. The most frequent bug is that an application doesn't have a way to use an arbitrary ALSA device, and instead has a drop-down box with pre-defined choices. Such applications often cannot work with Bluetooth headsets (that I don't have), FireWire audio cards (that I don't have either), and through non-default PulseAudio devices (and this has bit me when I tried to use Linphone with PulseAudio - I couldn't configure it to use the PC speaker through PulseAudio). What's even worse is that HAL endorses this faulty "drop-down box" enumeration scheme.