Re: GNOME 2 Sound Architecture and APIs?

[Alan Cox <alan redhat com>]

> 	Q. How would network-transparency be addressed?
> 	A. Most likely, talking to a local sound daemon (for
> 	   hardware only capable of a single stream) would be the
> 	   same as talking to a remote sound daemon.

You talk to the sound daemon based on $AUDIO and then $DISPLAY. You do 
synchronization via X once the X synchronization extension is brought back into
happiness.

> 	Q. How would sound events be handled?
> 	A. Currently esd stores the sound samples and plays
> 	   them back at the request of applications. One possible
> 	   solution is having gnome-session (or another per-session
> 	   process) perform this duty, and then devise a way for
> 	   applications to easily talk to this process.

Keeping the ability to have a sound daemon store samples isnt a bad thing
providing you manage the denial of service issues from sound uploading sanely.
The library needs to be able to find these as well as the server ideally though
so that direct audio works for people with high end cards.

Folks might also want to glance at OpenAL which is a different problem area but
one we need to be aware of long term if we want to do positional audio (and 
even left/right stereo hacks for positional beeps work interestingly well)