I caught the news yesterday via Phoronix that a new version of ALSA libraries and utilties came out. I went to go bump them in the portage tree, but Tony (chainsaw) already beat me to it. Thanks, man! 🙂
Looking at the detailed changelog, there are a lot of updates for the *hda cards, which is just what the world needed. I haven’t ever had any problems with them myself, but they are the de facto chipset on desktop motherboards right now, and it’s awesome to see support getting improved. Hopefully it’ll fix some of the countless issues Gentoo users are experiencing.
Too bad that the ChangeLog you looked at with “lot of updates for the *hda cards” is the ChangeLog of alsa-driver that exactly you and Tony made impossible to use …
Yeah, I get missed support of my x-fi soundcard too :).