Re: Polypaudio for Gnome 2.10, the next steps

[Lennart Poettering <mztabzr 0pointer de>]

On Tue, 23.11.04 12:07, Colin Walters (walters redhat com) wrote:

> > Besides, Polypaudio already exists and works, while your ALSA pulgin
> > doesn't exist yet.
> 
> For the local case, asym does exist.

asym? what's asym?

> > to change during runtime what to select() on: for readability,
> > writability or both). 
> 
> That's useful to know.  Probably should file an ALSA bugreport.

This is the internal plugin API of alsalib, they simple didn't care
about that yet.

> > I personally think the ALSA API is ugly, much to complicated and way
> > over-engineered.
> 
> The thing is though, the ALSA API has to be at a very low level so that
> people who want to can get the most out of their card's hardware.  The
> fundamental point in this discussion that Seth raised is that if we
> explicitly require Polypaudio in order for local sound mixing to work,
> then Polypaudio has to become *the* sound API.  If Polypaudio doesn't
> support accessing some card feature or whatever, then application
> developers have to make a choice between sound mixing and card feature,
> which is broken.

I don't want to push polypaudio as a replacement for ALSA. I can't win
that one. The ALSA API is designed with professional audio in
mind. Polypaudio is designed with desktop audio in mind. Professional
audio will always use ALSA at the lowest level possible.  Polypaudio
introduces a little latency, simply because you have to communicate
with it via IPC. Professional audio people don't like latency. 

And I don't want to push polypaudio as a required dependency of
Gnome. As I already expressed earlier, I really do like the idea of
having GStreamer as an abstraction layer for ding caching and playback
of simple sounds. On the other hand I do think that Gnome needs
networked and portable audio and things like that and that Polypaudio
should become the *default* audio system of the gnome desktop.

> > - Concurrent playback. You can achieve this with ALSA dmix. However,
> >   the last time I checked, it was incompatible
> >   like hell and failed to work in more places than it did work in
> >   other places. 
> 
> Just bugs, should be fixable.

Yes, the bugfix is called "polypaudio". ;-)

Lennart

-- 
name { Lennart Poettering } loc { Hamburg - Germany }
mail { mzft (at) 0pointer (dot) de } gpg { 1A015CC4 }  
www { http://0pointer.de/lennart/ } icq# { 11060553 }