[LAU] PulseAudio

[Paul Davis]

On Mon, 2008-04-14 at 10:04 +0200, Arnold Krille wrote:
>  So PulseAudio is by design not _the_ solution for 
> sound on the desktop. It is just another middle-layer for sound.

reasonable people might choose to disagree about this.

>  And why 
> should a desktop-app-dev adopt PulseAudio when he would have to use another 
> api/lib for video? Isn't it better to use one api/lib that has both and even 
> does them in sync?

gstreamer exists for this purpose. whether its the right solution is not
a question i am in a position to address. it is, however, vitally
important to distinguish between APIs intended for:

	* intra-application management of media streams
	* delivery/receipt of media streams to endpoints outside
	    of an application

PulseAudio is aimed at the second task; gstreamer is aimed at the first.
my impression is that Phonon is attempting to cover both. good? bad?
*you* decide :)

> And PulseAudio claims to unify both desktop-needs and pro-audio-needs. Another 
> place it will fail big time. Because it will never be good enough to have 
> ardour use PulseAudio. (Hint: Jack was designed for ardour...)

Lennart (PA's author) fully understands how and why JACK is different
from PulseAudio, and has long term to plans to try to provide
jack-server functionality within pulse. PA also has a JACK backend
already, so that you can use "desktop" apps while JACK is running and
still hear them.

--p