fc5 goals

[Bernardo Innocenti]

Jesse Keating wrote:

> On Tue, 2005-11-29 at 03:22 +0100, Bernardo Innocenti wrote:
>> Can't these darn desktops just play through ALSA without using
>> a sound server, like all normal applications do?
>>
> 
> And what is ALSA isn't available on the system?

Alsa has been available for a lot of time, but...


> This means that every
> gnome application must have it's own sound code to use either OSS or
> Alsa, and must have a configuration item for this and so on and so
> forth. By using a sound server, all the gnome apps automatically know
> where to send sound. The sound server then takes these inputs and on
> one place has configs for alsa or oss and does what it needs to do.

Using a simple library to abstract sound output would have solved
the problem with no need for an overengineered sound server.
SDL applications, for instance, can play to whatever sound
system you have (several platforms supported).

Keeping the sound configuration global to the desktop would still
be as easy as choosing fonts or the GKT theme.


> In reality this means that some users that have cards that can't handle
> multiple sources at once (an audio player may lock the sound device so
> no other app can make sound) can now get threaded sounds from
> applications.

This used to be a problem with some OSS drivers.  I believe ALSA
can mix audio streams in kernel, regardless of what the underlying
audio driver can do.


> There are other uses, this is just a couple of them.

I do agree someone may need a sound server to broadcast
audio over TCP or UDP... perhaps to support remote desktops.

If needed, the sound abstraction library may be configured
to to connect to something similar to esd or artsd.

Some advanced sound applications may also need to synchronize
and play different audio streams together, but this is something
artsd and esd can't do, as far as I know.  JACK does this, but
it's even more complex and less supported.

If I remember correctly, the BeOS multimedia framework was
natively capable of synchronize audio and video applications
to play together.  It allowed users to build very complex
stuff by combining many simple applications.

-- 
  // Bernardo Innocenti - Develer S.r.l., R&D dept.
\X/  http://www.develer.com/