Re: GNOME 2 Sound Architecture and APIs?

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel ximian com>]

> I would appreciate getting peoples views on where GNOME 2.x should be
> regarding its sound architecture. I am not trying to suggest that we
> should change the current GNOME 1.x sound, but more want to know what we
> collectively think is the right strategy/standard base that GNOME
> depends upon. I would like to be able to collectively develop a plan for
> enhancements etc which we agree we need to deliver as a part of GNOME 2.

I spoke briefly with Alan about this at GUADEC.  My personal feeling
was that many sound cards these day can do mixing in hardware and
allow multiple applications to open the dsp device (Alan then pointed
out that I am just lucky).

One thing that is still an issue is that we need an arbitrartion
mechanism for the audio device, and a program like esound/arts could
serve this purpose.

We could ship applications with an audiolibrary that would talk to the
arbitration daemon.  If the system audio supports multiple opens on
the dsp, then the daemon gives us a pointer to it `open /dev/dsp', if
not, then we get a handle to the daemon mixing `open
/tmp/audio-socket'.  For applications opening /dev/dsp, they would use
their in-proc library to do any kind of pre-processing that they were
expecting the daemon to do.

Miguel