On Thu, 9 Sep 2004, Christian Esken wrote: >> aren't any soundservers that are really closely connected with either desktop >> project I think we could probably do such in a reasonable fashion. > Which sound servers are there? > On Akademy I learned, gstreamer has none. > MAS has a sound server. > NMM has a sound server. > arts has a sound server. > esd is a sound server. > What about NAS? > ... Just in case there are people who don't know about this: ALSA's dmix plugin provides transparent (i.e. all ALSA apps can take advantage of it) software-mixing: http://opensrc.org/alsa/index.php?page=DmixPlugin http://opensrc.org/alsa/index.php?page=Dmix+Kde+-+arts%2C+ESD+and+SDL+quick+and+dirty+HOWTO http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_ALSA_sound_mixer_aka_dmix http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=99075 It's not perfect, but all the time getting better. It has some very good features: - the API is stable (alsa-lib past 1.0, has been developed since 1998 and has received much attention from both driver and application developers) - the API is widely used: ALSA is the default in Linux-2.6 --> alsa-lib is the standard API .. lots and lots of applications - dmix is very lightweight (no server process; the mechanism Jaroslav has come up with is very, very clever) - provides the option to use hw-acceleration on cards that support it (not automatic, but fits the model perfectly as ALSA knows about hw capabilities) - does not add any additional latency, and very little processing overhead (again, it's a very clever mechanmism) - etc, etc... Now the biggest problem for KDE and GNOME is that alsa-lib is currently Linux-only... or is it? Now what you may not know that there is already a plugin to make alsa-lib talk to jackd. And JACK of course has support for PortAudio which again is probably the most widely supported cross-platform audio backend. Ok, I admit that is at least one abstract layer too much, but you get the picture -- alsa-lib is not just about Linux. Someone just has to write alsa-lib plugins for BSDs, Solaris, win32 and so on... Definititely ALSA's dmix does not solve all the problems. I still prefer to run JACK on top of alsa-lib, as I need sample-synchronous execution of multiple apps and inter-app routing (these are required for multitrack recording where multiple audio apps are contributing to one session). Also, media players will need a decoder-encoder-processor framework such as gstreamer or aRts. Network support is another thing (maybe another alsa-lib plugin). Anyway, as alsa-lib is a library, basicly anything (network transparency, mixing, alternative backends) can be added to it without affecting the applications. All the time, the stable, post-1.0, widely used API of alsa-lib will remain the same. It's something on top of which we can all build our own systems (think: libX11...). -- http://www.eca.cx Audio software for Linux! _______________________________________________ kde-multimedia mailing list kde-multimedia@kde.org https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-multimedia