18 May
2009
18 May
'09
12:37 p.m.
p.s. what does pulse/dbus do, that Jack can't, if the same relentless
effort being put into the dbus/pulse hybrid, were put into maturing
Jack even further? And what of the devs who refuse, are reluctant to,
or don't see the advantages in writing Jack audio code, and plugins
for their apps? I still don't understand how writing a pulse plugin is
any harder than writing a jack audio plugin, or code.
Pulse and DBus are two completely different things....
DBus is a means for two processes to communicate with each other. It is the
standard way of communicating with running applications on GNOME and KDE 4
Desktop environments. KDE 2/3 had a different IPC mechanism which was very
similar.
Though it is typically run in a desktop environment AFAIK it is not dependent
on having a desktop. Using DBus for IPC is a bit like using XML to do your
config files... You get to do the job using standard tools and libraries and end
up maintaining less code.
It also means that users and developers now have a standardised method of
talking to your app/daemon while it is running. I am hoping this can go some
ways to providing a LASH interface that works properly.
Currently I don't see any long term downsides to using DBus as the IPC. The
short term problems is that applications like qjackctl can't yet properly
interact with a dbus based Jack and until that happens the old method should
be the one that the distros use by default.
Pulse on the other hand is a sound deamon that does seem to be taking over
things. Mostly it provides a means of using different applications together on
hardware that does not support hardware mixing. (something I would much rather
see ALSA fixed properly to do. To me it is a reasonable idea in theory but a
PITA in practice. Fortunately I have a FFADO soundcard which means that jack
is the only supported means of communicating with the hardware. Since xinelib
now supports jack - pretty much everything I want to use will work. You know
for when I want to listen to Pistols and Flowers in Amarok and plagiarise
guitar licks :p