[linux-audio-user] New Sound Subsystem Needed For Qt4/KDE4

[Arnold Krille]

Hi,

2005/7/29, Mark Constable <markc at renta.net>:
> Apparently aRts could be removed from KDE4 CVS HEAD RSN. As far
> as I know there is no decision on an official replacement yet.
> I have no say in the matter but I would like to see something
> like qjackctl ported to KDE4 and usable from within kcontrol,
> basically, Jack embedded into the system from the ground up.
> My general question, to those who know far more than me, is
> just what would be the ideal sound subsystem for KDE in 2006
> seeing there is a clean slate and an opportunity to get it
> right from the get go ?

You should subscribe to kde-multimedia at kde.org and ask the question there.

The short answer is: KDE doesn't need jack or portaudio or alsa. It
needs a soundsystem or even better a sound-api which it can tell "play
me file XYZ", "play video YQ with the sound going through that filter
and with that volume". These are things that basic alsa/jack/portaudio
can't do.
The obvious answer would be xine/mplayer/gstreamer/arts. The
experience with aRts tells use not to focus on one soundsystem and get
lost if that is not maintained anymore. Thats why the
kdemultimedia-devs (Matthias Kretz, Scoot Wheeler and some more)
decided to create a layer between the running soundservers and the
KDE-apps. This has the advantages that the normal KDE-dev doesn't care
about what system is underneath. And that KDE can change the default
soundserver (or even the distributions can change the default).
Gstreamer will probably be the first choice for the default server but
there are also tests with NAS, NMM, xine and some more going on...

Please say good-bye to the thought of jack as the soundserver for
everything. Jack is for professional raw datastreams with very little
latency. For the typical desktop-app/game its irrelevant how much
latency there is (if its not 2 secs) but it wants to play mp3 without
thinking about encoding it...

And yes, I am an official kde-mm-developer, I wrote KRec and do the
translation of the gui and docs into german. And I suffered with aRts
from the devels view...

Arnold

PS: For more info see http://vir.homelinux.org/talks/kdemm/lt2005/

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