[LAU] RME HDSP Multiface and PulseAudio

[Paul Davis]

On Fri, Jun 25, 2010 at 1:21 PM, James Warden <warjamy at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Works really good for what I am using it for. No pulseaudio, no gstreamer, pure ALSA only.

many people seem confused by what gstreamer is. its not anything like
JACK or PulseAudio or ALSA. if you use Rythmbox, for example, it will
be using gstreamer no matter how the audio gets out of your machine.
gstreamer is an intra-application framework for handling streaming
data. it has a variety of "plugins" that can be connected together to
form a pipeline *WITHIN* an application. one of those plugins is
generally going to be an output plugin, and it might be the ALSA
output plugin, the Pulse output plugin, the JACK output plugin etc.
etc. etc.

put differently, you can dump JACK, Pulseaudio, ALSA from your system
and it won't remove the use of gstreamer by applications, just like it
won't remove the use of libsndfile.

--p