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

[Arnold Krille]

Hi ce and others...

2005/7/29, Christoph Eckert <ce at christeck.de>:
> > 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)
> sorry, wrong. What about the gamers?

Typical kde-game has beeps and short bings as sounds, not a full
soundenvironment.
And it certainly doesn't need realtime.
Every other game uses gl or sdl and the needed soundsystem...

> What about keeping audio
> and video in sync?

1: This will be done by the underlying soundsystem, not by kde.
2: Can Jack do video?

> What about the (still missing) Garage Band
> clone on the KDE desktop?

This will use jack directly...

> All of these will need low latency, and especially Garage Band
> is a product for Amateur use.

But you don't need low latency for the "You got mail"-sound or the
bing of kopete. And therefor it is not the solution to struggle with
jack. And jack can't do decoding, which the kde apps need!

> We're on free software, and there's no need (at least from a
> technical POV) to deny desktop users the use of low latency
> audio and video. We're at an important "point of no return":
> We can make the right decision *now* or the audio and video
> struggle will continue.

We don't make a decision, apart from beeing open which soundsystem the
future brings. We from kde don't want to focus on one system and
realize its not maintained two years later... bad experience from the
past...

just face it: jack is _very_ good for professional and semi-pro usage
in audio. But it is not a full multimedia-system (audio _and_ video)
and it doesn't decode any files. These are the things kde needs!

What keeps KDE from switching to gstreamer directly: binary
compatibility. gstreamer has changed its api in a bic way about three
times the last two years, kde ensures bc for the full kde3 and again
for the full kde4-lifetime.

My last comment: You from LA[UD] won't change KDE's decision, which
already has been made... towards a layer between kde and the
soundsystem to use to be able to choose the soundsystem during
runtime...

And Linux doesn't have to choose _the_ one soundsystem to rule them
all. The big advantage of Linux is exchangability.

Have a nice weekend,

Arnold

-- 
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