26 Apr
2005
26 Apr
'05
10:49 p.m.
Last Tuesday 26 April 2005 21:23, Christoph Eckert was like:
Your posting makes me think that I have developed a very fixed view point
about such things.
FWIW, it would
be really nice to see some united effort to
jackify some of the other critical Linux audio apps even if
their original authors do not feel like that is one of
their priorities
People who start to write an audio application have a
difficult decicion to do: Which soundsystem to use? Because all this mess about audio leads in the
following:
* An author of 'professional grade' audio applications will
make his application an JACK and perhaps additionally an ALSA
application
Surely the most obvious choice would be to make it an ALSA/JACK application -
unless it doesn't need JACK? In which case, just ALSA.
* A KDE programmer will make his application an artsd
application
* A Gnome programmer will make his application an
esound
application
Erm, as a user I would regard anything that used only artsd or esd to be
involved in sound notification. I generally don't need these features. From a
user perspective Audio applications should use ALSA. If an application does
not use ALSA I will either not use that app, turn off the sound features or
figure some other workaround.
* Others will make their application an ALSA
application
...
* People who want their application to run on other
unixes too
will make their application an OSS application (see the
commercials like real or Skype)
This is the only other relevant choice.
There is the example JACK capture client which is a
good
starting point for programming newbies.
What would really be useful would be some example code in the
ALSA wiki showing how to create an application which is
jackified but even can play and record via an ALSA DMIX
device and optionally has further input/output plugins for
esound, artsd and gstreamer. And which can automatically
detect the audio subsystem to use *sigh* ;-) .
I realise that from the POV of non-music-making applications it might look
this way, especially if you were bothered about cross-platform portability. I
think if you were writing a specific Linux Audio application you would use
ALSA. Please excuse me if I'm missing something that would be obvious to a
programmer. As a musician and a Linux user I set my machine up to use ALSA
and get quite annoyed when other apps launch another sound system in the
background and block my soundcard. Actually It bothers me so much that I'm
thinking of uninstalling both artsd and esd, but I'm not sure if dependencies
will allow this.
cheers,
tim hall
http://glastonburymusic.org.uk