[Ardour-Dev] What do all the drivers do?

[John Emmas]

A couple of days ago I fired up Ardour (2.5) and found that it wasn't
replaying any audio.  The meters were going up & down but nothing was
getting sent to my sound card.  It took a bit of tracking down but all that
had happened was that the driver had somehow got set to 'Dummy'.  I set it
back to 'ALSA' and everything sprung back into life.

However, being the curious type, I decided to try the other listed drivers
(OSS / NetJACK etc).  AFAICT all they did was to produce an error message
along the lines "No devices found for driver OSS" (or NetJACK, or whatever).
I took a look at the relevant code in gtk2_ardour/engine_dialog.cc and found
that the corresponding enumeration functions
(EngineControl::enumerate_netjack_devices() etc) simply don't do anything.

So I looked at the same file in the 3.0 svn branch and found that it seems
to have even more device enumerators that don't do anything!  Am I missing
something - or should those other drivers be working??  Or does it depend on
my hardware?

Thanks,

John