[LAU] Daemons, daemons...kill those daemons.

[Paul Davis]

On Sun, Jun 14, 2009 at 11:15 AM, Brent Busby<brent at keycorner.org> wrote:
> Now that I've gotten a pretty clear picture of the concensus about
> PulseAudio, I wondered about some of the other (new and old) sound
> facilities in Linux, and specifically wondered if being on a system like
> Gentoo where one can turn off build-time support for these things is a
> good idea.  So...
>
>
> PortAudio:

PortAudio is just a portable API. there is no server, no backend
anything. It doesn't provide shared hardware access. It is unrelated
to everything else in your list.

>  Ideally, all sound apps, regardless of what target
> they're expecting, ought to be able to transparently find the Alsa
> mixer, and multiplex with other apps to share access with it
> simultaneously, also without special setup.

There is no "ALSA mixer" for multiplexing apps unless you mean dmix
and or a "share" plugin. Both of these "work" for some definition of
the term, but both have also been tested and found wanting as a
general solution to the problem of shared h/w access.