Yep – that would be nice…And I’m sure someday someone will have the time and motivation to code a spiffy Preferences panel for it. Meanwhile, a perfectly adequate solution – necessary to me and some others – has sat ignored for five years. I should be clear that my patch is an exact replication of what Korli did for the AUICH driver. That has an “auich.settings”, I have “hda.settings”.
I’m not even sure that a text settings file isn’t more appropriate here than a panel. It’s something one will normally set once for their machine, and never touch again. I’ve occasionally experimented, but otherwise it’s set-and-forget. Certainly one could adjust the default buffers to a better value – an even quicker patch! – though there’s the danger that it might no longer be correct for, say, older machines.
In any case, it seems wrong to deny a particular solution that is perectly good and needed by some people simply because you think there ought to be “something better”. As this is a volunteer project, I’d think it more reasonable to accept a fix that someone has taken the trouble to implement. This sort of thing is one of the reasons that my enthusiasm for submitting patches has waned considerably.