14 Jun
2009
14 Jun
'09
4:39 p.m.
On Sun, Jun 14, 2009 at 11:15 AM, Brent Busby<brent(a)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.