17 Jun
2005
17 Jun
'05
3:45 p.m.
On Fri, Jun 17, 2005 at 06:58:18PM +0200, Frank Barknecht wrote:
... like Ardour, which requires Jack instead of
working with Arts or
Esound.
JACK is not part of any desktop system. It's absolutely neutral in
this sense, _and_ designed to support 'professional' audio. For a
tool like Ardour, I don't think there any other choice.
I think, that you're a bit unfair in regard to
desktop environments.
What about the role, sound can play in the accessibility of desktops,
by giving acoustic feedback? We "pro audio guys" hate these bells and
chimes, but to other users they can be important, and somehow you need
some way to send these sounds from a Gonme/KDE app using Gnome/KDE
libs to the soundcard, preferably in a simple, consistent way for
application developers.
Or go the other way around: Speech recognition. The users talks,
X-Wordoffice writes it down. This is not that uncommon anymore in the
Win/Mac world, and it also requires the application developer to deal
with sound input *and* you need to get it into the desktop's document
layer. Preferably Gnome/KDE make it easy to get to this sound with
their own libraries.
Valid points, and you even forgot VoIP.
The best of course would be a solution, which works
accross all
desktops and non-desktops. But this would require all applications to
be "broken" in the regard, that all these apps should support at least
this solution.
I think we should (and can) keep the desktop and 'pro' worlds separate.
And if they have to be integrated, the solution will be JACK. Writing
a JACKified app is not harder (rather the contrary) than for any other
API I know. There could be some libs on top of JACK to make the common
things such as bells and chimes even simpler {jack_play("boing.wav");}.
The only condition is that jackd should be 100% reliable and monkey-proof,
but I think it's already quite close to that target.
I remember that when I started using Linux (SL 8.1) JACK was quite
a hairy thing to have on you system, and a few months later at the first
LAC, there were lots of "killall jackd" all the time. And now ? When my
desktop comes up qjackctl starts running, and it stays there for as long
as the system is up.
--
FA