[linux-audio-user] Re: [linux-audio-dev] music engine

[Alberto Botti]

Il giorno ven, 07/04/2006 alle 23.28 -0400, Lee Revell ha scritto:
> On Sat, 2006-04-08 at 03:04 +0000, carmen wrote:
> > 
> > what advantage does it serve other than insulating yourself against
> > the external API (ALSA dying in 6 months? i think not..)
> > 
> 
> I found this very interesting:
> 
> http://lurkertech.com/linuxvideoio.html
> 
> It seems as if ALSA+JACK does exactly what this SGI engineer recommends
> ("just give me the data!") while gstreamer does the opposite...

Well, I think than applications like Totem or Rhythmbox have different
goals than professional audio apps... they don't need to know explicitly
(nor want to code for special cases) about the properties of the data
stream. They also (at least for Totem) need to deal with video, which is
way more complex. But an audio processing engine *has* to deal with the
raw samples.

I'm writing a small audio server-client application, called FreeMix,
which uses GStreamer as the input source (reading from files and
decoding them into audio frames), then processing/mixing them and
handling the results to JACK, in a RT-safe way. It's input layer is
currently awaiting a rewrite for the new gst 0.10 API (and I really need
to remove all the dirty hacks I've used...), but I don't have any time
to work on it at the moment.

In my testing the audio part of gstreamer (I used 0.8) worked pretty
well on most formats (WAV, Ogg/Vorbis, MP3, FLAC, and some MODs...).
I'll take a deeper look at 0.10, sooner or later.