Re: esound and playing mp3's ?

[raster redhat com]

On  9 Jan, R Pickett scribbled:
->  On Sat, 9 Jan 1999, Michael Johnson wrote:
->  
->  > It's really sad to have to kill esd to play an mp3 and then restart
->  > it when you're finished as I think the whole point of having a sound
->  > daemon was to not have to do this. 
->  
->  Ah, a topic near and dear to my heart.
->  
->  I don't run esd, simple because I mostly run 'un-enlightened' sound-producing
->  programs.  The entire concept that a single daemon is going to grab my sound
->  hardware and only allow access to esd-compliant programs seems very contrary
->  to the goals of OpenSource;  it's a very "my way or the highway" attitude for

incorrect. RTFM pay attention.

esddsp app_name

ooh wow it works via esd now

esddsp x11amp

ooh it works via sed now

esddsp blahblah

humpf

donest work with everything but works with quiet a few standard audio
apps.

there's ALSO 
esdctl off
esdctl on
where esd will respectively release its hold on /dev/dsp and the regain
it if it can.

->  a program to take.  It's also going to hinder Gnome acceptance in the
->  short-term -- try telling the newbie, that's just installed his
->  Gnome-containing distribution,  that he can't run his RealAudio without killing
->  a process or doing CLI piping.  Speaking of which....

why? there will just be a tiny wrapper scritp to run realaudio under
esd - it works here.

esddsp rvplayer

need i say more.

->  esdcat is a kludge of the worst degree.  Having to pipe my audio through a
->  second process just to hear it is not acceptable.  I'm in the process of
->  writing a series of articles for Electronic Musician magazine about Linux- and
->  OpenSource- based music tools, and my target audience will not be tolerant of
->  extra overhead, no matter how small, between producing sound and hearing it.
->  And so, esd isn't even on the map for mentioning in this series, unless it is
->  to say that Gnome is shaping up to be very nice except don't run the sound
->  daemon if you want to get professional sound design or music production work
->  done.

well if apps were written well and latency was an issue they coudl
happily upload samples to esd then tell esd to play then as needed.
esd is not finished - give it a break boy! do you think they developed
X11 in a year? esd is the correct principle - it is the sampel
rpinciple by whihc X works - you dont seem to complain about this. If
you have issues then HELP wiht development. Dont' just sit and complain.

->  One simple thought that comes to mind;  it would seem that it would be easy
->  enough to write esd to grab /dev/dspX only when there's a sound to be played,
->  and then let go once it's done.  That would also allow for on-the-fly sample
->  rate and bit depth handling without conversion, since esd could re-config
->  /dev/dspX at each grab.  And non-enlightened programs could do their thing in
->  the meantime.
->  
->  Also, I run the commercial version of OSS, with the SoftMix capability -- I
->  have /dev/dsp0 - /dev/dsp15, each of which can be opened and utilized
->  concurrently with the others, and will be mixed on-the-fly by the kernel
->  module (where this kind of capability belongs, IMHO, but that's not really my
->  topic).  Given that esd could have the grab-and-release capability discussed
->  in the previous paragraph, couldn't it also be written simply to grab the next
->  available /dev/dspX and blat directly to it without any further processing?
->  THAT would be a useful tool, since currently, the end-user or the OSS-based
->  program has to keep tabs on the currently-used /dev/dsp's and pick an unused
->  one by hand.  For those of us using some of the OSS hardware drivers for
->  profesional audio hardware, esd would then become a VERY thin audio-out
->  manager, which is something that the various OpenSource audio systems are
->  SORELY lacking.  And then provide its own mixing and the like for folks that
->  have just the consumer soundcards with the one hardware output, where tens of
->  milliseconds of overhead is acceptable.
->  
->  Just a few thoughts -- I'm meeting with my co-writer for these articles this
->  afternoon, so this stuff is strongly on my mind.  I'd like to talk to some of
->  the esd people off-line, if they're interested...
->  
->  Thanks for listening to my mostly off-topic rant.
->  

-- 
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