9 Jun
2009
9 Jun
'09
8:40 p.m.
On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 5:38 PM, Dave Phillips<dlphillips(a)woh.rr.com> wrote:
The JavaSound developers seem to have mistaken JACK
for something like esd.
From http://www.jsresources.org/faq_misc.html#no_daemons :
**
"Why is there no artsd/esd support in Java Sound?
In Florian's and my opinion, mixing daemons like artsd, esd, JACK,
rplay, NAS, yiff, ... are hacks that work around a shortcoming of the
device drivers. We feel that mixing should be done either by the
soundcard hardware or in software by the device driver. For Windows
(DirectSound) and Solaris, this is self-evident, while Linux is lagging
behind. The OSS driver model is obsolete technology anyway, and ALSA can
do mixing in software with the dmix plug-in
<http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php?page=DmixPlugin>. With this state of
affairs, all these discussions about mixing daemons could be settled
once for all. Never again would a sound program have to reinvent the
wheel with output plugins for /dev/dsp, ALSA, esd, arts, [you name it].
This would be a very efficient solution in terms of using (vs. wasting)
programmer time. It would even enable the coexistence of several mixing
daemons for backward compatibility. So why not do the obvious, elegant,
technically clean, (human) resource saving?"
Dave - I've had this argument with at least one of them online
(somewhere). No, this particular person didn't get it and I suspect
the others won't either. The critical arguments are:
(a) the linux kernel has a general design principle of providing
mechanism not policy
(b) audio mixing is generally best done in floating point format
(because otherwise its dog slow to simulate
fixed point on an x86-style processor) and the kernel cannot
do floating point math
(c) as you allude, JACK is not about providing just shared access
to the audio interface, but routing
between applications as well, which a kernel-based solution
has no role in. this is why JACK
is still so useful on OS X, even though CoreAudio *does*
support mixing multiple app
Best,
dp
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