What Parts of Linux Audio Simply Work Great? (was Re: [linux-audio-dev] Best-performing Linux-friendly MIDI interfaces?)

[fons adriaensen]

On Fri, Jun 17, 2005 at 06:58:18PM +0200, Frank Barknecht wrote:

> ... like Ardour, which requires Jack instead of working with Arts or
> Esound. 

JACK is not part of any desktop system. It's absolutely neutral in
this sense, _and_ designed to support 'professional' audio. For a
tool like Ardour, I don't think there any other choice.

> I think, that you're a bit unfair in regard to desktop environments.
> What about the role, sound can play in the accessibility of desktops,
> by giving acoustic feedback? We "pro audio guys" hate these bells and
> chimes, but to other users they can be important, and somehow you need
> some way to send these sounds from a Gonme/KDE app using Gnome/KDE
> libs to the soundcard, preferably in a simple, consistent way for
> application developers. 
> 
> Or go the other way around: Speech recognition. The users talks,
> X-Wordoffice writes it down. This is not that uncommon anymore in the
> Win/Mac world, and it also requires the application developer to deal
> with sound input *and* you need to get it into the desktop's document
> layer. Preferably Gnome/KDE make it easy to get to this sound with
> their own libraries. 

Valid points, and you even forgot VoIP.

> The best of course would be a solution, which works accross all
> desktops and non-desktops. But this would require all applications to
> be "broken" in the regard, that all these apps should support at least
> this solution.

I think we should (and can) keep the desktop and 'pro' worlds separate. 
And if they have to be integrated, the solution will be JACK. Writing
a JACKified app is not harder (rather the contrary) than for any other
API I know. There could be some libs on top of JACK to make the common
things such as bells and chimes even simpler {jack_play("boing.wav");}.
The only condition is that jackd should be 100% reliable and monkey-proof,
but I think it's already quite close to that target.

I remember that when I started using Linux (SL 8.1) JACK was quite 
a hairy thing to have on you system, and a few months later at the first
LAC, there were lots of "killall jackd" all the time. And now ? When my
desktop comes up qjackctl starts running, and it stays there for as long
as the system is up. 

-- 
FA