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

Christoph Eckert ce at christeck.de
Sat Jul 30 05:03:57 EDT 2005


Hi Arnold and others :) ,


> 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...

Heh, without any doubt the current KDE games don't need 
realtime for audio.

What I'm talking about are shooter games or even car races, 
maybe with force feedback joysticks. You press the fire 
button, the enemy dies and after that you hear the sound of 
your gun? You play a car race, crash your competitor and 
after 2 seconds you'll hear the audio?

> > 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?

Currently not, but AFAIK the design of JACK allows any kind of 
streaming data.

> > What about the (still missing) Garage Band
> > clone on the KDE desktop?
>
> This will use jack directly...

Likely. Why isn't JACK the default?

> > 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.

But OTOH it would be nothing bad to also play bells and 
whistles with low latency, right?

> And therefor it is not the solution 
> to struggle with jack. And jack can't do decoding, which
> the kde apps need!

OK, that's an argument.

> > 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...

Hehe. I don't think that JACK will die soon ;-) .

> 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!

OK, still there's no video support, but decoding counts. It's 
not the Job of JACK.

[...]

> 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...

The goal is not to change any decision. I'm interested in 
drawing a picture to compare what we need and what we already 
have to simplify and improve the Linux desktop experience.

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

In theory, yes.It's a fairy tale as the tale about open file 
formats. Can I open a Rosegarden file in MusE? No...


Best regards


    ce



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