On 14/04/2008, Arnold Krille <arnold@arnoldarts.de> wrote:

Am Montag, 14. April 2008 schrieb Ken Restivo:

> On Tue, Apr 08, 2008 at 10:44:00AM +0200, Alberto Botti wrote:
> > Il giorno mar, 08/04/2008 alle 09.53 +0200, hollunder@gmx.at ha scritto:
> > > Of course, PA and jack don't work together either (at the same time on
> > > the same device(interface?) at least). Both need full access.
> > I've not tried it yet, but recent versions of PulseAudio have a JACK
> > sink...

> Maybe I am confused.
> Is PulseAudio a replacement for ALSA or does it sit on top of ALSA?

No, PulseAudio sits on top of Alsa like any other sound-library/-server.

> Is it even attempting to be a replacement for JACK in terms of pro-audio
> real-time low-latency?

No more than for example aRts did...

> Or is it a replacement for esd or whatever sound daemon or the GNOME or KDE
> daemon thing use?

It aims to be _the_ replacement for life, the universe and everything. And in
my oppinion it will fail big time.
Back when KDE did choose aRts for the central soundsystem, there was soon the
call for one soundsystem for all desktops. So there was an attempt to adopt
aRts to gnome. After a lot of work from the aRts dev, gnome decided to go
with esd...
Now KDE introduces a big multimedia-framework that will truly be portable.
(Note that a multimedia-framework is better then a sound-framework for
desktop use, because it includes both audio and video in one api.) Phonon
will be shipped with Qt and therefor every platform Qt supports will sooner
or later have a working Phonon-backend.
Where does PulseAudio come into that picture? - When the gnome-guys realized
that esd is out of date and they want a new api/lib. Unfortunately they
decided to a) write their own and not adopt what is there and b) to go
audio-only which means no chance of KDE adopting it (apart from the fact that
kde already has Phonon). So PulseAudio is by design not _the_ solution for
sound on the desktop. It is just another middle-layer for sound. And why
should a desktop-app-dev adopt PulseAudio when he would have to use another
api/lib for video? Isn't it better to use one api/lib that has both and even
does them in sync?
And PulseAudio claims to unify both desktop-needs and pro-audio-needs. Another
place it will fail big time. Because it will never be good enough to have
ardour use PulseAudio. (Hint: Jack was designed for ardour...)

> If so, how is PulseAudio any different from any other desktop sound daemon
> that JACK users have been disabling since time immemorial?

PulseAudio is just another api/lib accessing the various sound-daemons we
always disable.

Much personal opinion...

Arnold

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