Re: Polypaudio for Gnome 2.10, the next steps

[Lennart Poettering <mztabzr 0pointer de>]

On Tue, 23.11.04 14:20, Colin Walters (walters redhat com) wrote:

> 
> On Tue, 2004-11-23 at 19:15 +0000, Mike Hearn wrote:
> 
> > I'm not sure it should be a distro-level decision though. Way too much
> > stuff is already pushed down to the distro level and it causes lots of
> > painful fragmentation and bizarre quirks you have to work around in 3rd
> > party software. So I'd like to see GNOME and KDE make a unified decision
> > on this, whatever that is.
> 
> Even GNOME and KDE together can't override the rest of the world's sound
> API and force everyone to use Polypaudio.  Linux has ALSA.  Solaris

Hey. nobody wants to force anyone to use a specific sound API. In fact
I hesitated to write a polypaudio specific client library. What I'd
like to see as something like a better PortAudio, a common sound API,
that is sane, portable, powerful and easy to use. An API that
currently doesn't exist. Only libao and PortAudio seem to work in that
direction. libao is too limited, and PortAudio is somewhat
incompatible with networked audio is very Windows centric. Tim Janik
and Stefan Westerfeld (the arts and the beast guys) once tried to
develop such a library (libcsl). Unfortunately they didn't
succeed. The project is dead, more or less.

Don't think of polypaudio as "just another sound API". Polypaudio is a
networked sound daemon. Yes, it has its own API. But only software
that wants to use some features specific to polypaudio should use that
API. In a perfect world everybody would use that libcsl library, and
nothing else.

Lennart

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