[linux-audio-user] Great news for JACK & KDE

[Robert Jonsson]

Friday 21 November 2003 16.19 skrev Erik Steffl:
> Ross Vandegrift wrote:
> > On Fri, Nov 21, 2003 at 10:22:57AM +0000, Daniel James wrote:
> >>Anyone want to defend the use of artsd?
> >
> > I'll take a swing.  It's a working way to get multiple stream output
> > for applications.  Yes, we would scoff at its performance but that's not
>
>    that's one fat lie (yes it does but no it doesn't solve the problem
> it's supposed to solve). if you need it in the first place (card does
> not support multi channels) you cannot use it because not all aps use it
> and you're in the same audo blocking hell as without it.
>
>    example: set mozilla to use arts, set xmms to use arts etc... and
> then go and surf the web, flash, realplayer etc. all do not use arts and
> thus your mozilla blocks (looks frozen) on number of pages... (I suspect
> it's mostly flash, used in banners, not playing any sound but still
> trying to open audio)
>
>    now what did arts help exactly?

This scenario does actually work if you use konqueror, even with plugins that 
use /dev/dsp directly. Konqueror ld-preloads all plugins with artsdsp (if you 
enable it) and can thus avoid the problem.
That said... it is still a kludge. A unified environment would have been much 
better, but the odds for achieving this aren't very good.

Linux has to take a rather big piece of the market before plugin makers (and 
similar) will make specific adaptions for the environments faced. Realplayer 
is the one, of the top of my head, that comes closest, they have support for 
both /dev/dsp and esd. Now, how much good does that do? ;).
I think this whole debacle has the potential of undermining the entire concept 
of Linux on the desktop... like I said in the begining, it's possible to get 
it to work... but it's cludges all the way....

/dev/dsp
alsa
esd
arts
gstreamer
jack
<probably others>

choice is good... but for linux-on-the-desktop(tm) this sucks...

/Robert

>
>    that's why the problem of multiple applications trying to use
> soundcard has to be solved by something that pretty much everybody uses
>
> 	erik