[linux-audio-user] Few questions on audio technologies

[Steve Harris]

On Mon, Mar 21, 2005 at 02:16:19 -0500, Tristan Van Berkom wrote:
> Please excuse the double post, 
> I hit the moderator and realized I was not subscibed :-)
> 
> =========
> Hi all,
>    I am writing a multi-streamed audio player for an embedded linux system
> and am a little confused about what technology will accomplish what task for
> me (I've been reading up but thought that maybe some of you might easily
> point me in the right directions).
> 
> - Is JACK a suitable place to implement entire audio pipelines ?
>   (i.e. if I have one "jack client" for each link in the pipeline; one
>   reading an mp3 file, another decoding the mp3 file and outputting
>   pcm data and another one creating FFT data for other purposes etc.)

No. In particular sending FFT data over JACK will be tricky.

I would only use JACK for PCM i/o, and do everything else with some other
IPC.
 
> - Is ALSA capable of really "mixing" or does it only route available
>   commands supported by the hardware ?

Goggle for dmix. If you care about this though, JACK is probably better.

- Steve