Re: Audio apps (was Re: Proposed Modules, My Take)

[Rob Taylor <robtaylor fastmail fm>]

On Wed, 2005-01-19 at 16:31 +0000, Damon Chaplin wrote:
> 
> Have we considered high-end (or at least semi-pro) audio apps? Ideally
> the GNOME/KDE platforms should support these too, across all
> distros/OSes (and preferably compatible with each other).
> 
> What is our policy there? gstreamer + polypaudio? gstreamer + Jack?
> Jack seems to be very popular among audio apps, so I'd guess it should
> be in there somewhere. A combined polypaudio/Jack audio server sounds
> good to me, but I don't really know much about it.

A gstreamer jack plugin exists, I believe. However applications need to
be specially written to use jack, you can't do it invisibly (well not
without losing the point of jack - low latancy response), so the generic
framework based around polypaudio should be fine for pros as well, as
latancy wont matter for apps that use it. Polypaudio should probably be
made able to talk to jack so pros can still route their system sound
using jack routing (hence can play their dvds though their nice
monitors, if they so wish ;) )

Note that a system capable of running jack properly is insecure (due to
realtime-lsm, or so i'm told). It is possible to run jack without this
module, however, judging from
http://jackit.sourceforge.net/docs/faq.php#a3, it would not be a good
idea to demand that apps depend on it... 

Rob Taylor