Re: [linux-audio-dev] aRts C API ready!

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Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] aRts C API ready!
From: Benno Senoner (sbenno_AT_gardena.net)
Date: Tue Apr 25 2000 - 16:56:03 EEST


Stefan,
I appreciate your efforts, but in my opinion, the ideal thing
would be to have a layer inside ALSA (is the plugin layer suitable for this?)
to let redirect apps from direct output to your foobar soundserver.
Recoding the apps by outputting directly to arts is not the right thing to do,
since:
- there may be many soundservers around,
- the effort to port zillions of apps is simply too big
- there are many binary-only apps which can not be changed.

I think ALSA is and will be the de-facto audio API which all Linux
apps should use.
That means if one wants to go through Arts, that should be
user-transparent.
The only problem of such hookups it so handle fragment num,
fragment sizes, wordlen, samplefrequencies etc correcly,
and that has to be taken into account in the soundserver too, not only in the
redirector layer/plugin.

BTW writing an ALSA redirector for every soundserver, would allow us
to run ALSA apps on any system, be it direct audio, esd, Arts etc.

> for public use. This means, you can now grab any software package you
> like and turn it into an aRts aware software package with a few lines
> of code. ;-)

the gaol is ZERO lines of code.

comments ?
(Jaroslav are my assumptions reasonable ?)

Benno.

On Mon, 24 Apr 2000, Stefan Westerfeld wrote:
> Hi!
>
> I am happy to announce that the aRts C API - which allows you to send
> streams of samples to the aRts sound server using plain C - is ready
>
> Background: artsd is a sound server based on the aRts/MCOP multimedia
> component technology. A sound server allows you to let many applications
> use the audio device at the same time. So it allows you do listen to
> music, while still playing a game. For instance, you can now play Quake
> and listen to mp3s. And still get an audible notification when you got
> new email. Of course, this is much more fun when more applications are
> aRts aware.
>
> To show how easy porting is this, I did the port for two apps, namely
>
> - Quake (patch against quakeforge-0.1.1) => it has good response times ;-)
> - Mpg123 (patch against mpg123-0.59r)
>
> It was really little work (besides writing the API of course). The snd_arts.c
> driver for quake for instance is the smallest of all sound drivers with
> about 160 lines of code, which are mostly copied from the other quake
> sound drivers.
>
> The necessary aRts code is in the KDE-2.0 CVS where the other aRts stuff
> lives. But there are also standalone snapshots, which dont require X11,
> Qt or KDE to work. The snapshots are available at:
>
> http://space.twc.de/~stefan/kde/arts-snapshot-doc.html
>
> And here is the URL where you can documentation for the C API & the patches:
>
> http://space.twc.de/~stefan/kde/arts-mcop-doc/artsc.html
>
> Any comments to the API or more patches are of course welcome. Expect the
> first "official" releases of aRts soon.
>
> Cu... Stefan
> --
> -* Stefan Westerfeld, stefan_AT_space.twc.de (PGP!), Hamburg/Germany
> KDE Developer, project infos at http://space.twc.de/~stefan/kde *-


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