Re: What Parts of Linux Audio Simply Work Great? (was Re: [linux-audio-dev] Best-performing Linux-friendly MIDI interfaces?)

From: Alfons Adriaensen <fons.adriaensen@email-addr-hidden>
Date: Fri Jun 17 2005 - 16:24:33 EEST

On Fri, Jun 17, 2005 at 12:48:11PM +0100, Damon Chaplin wrote:

> On Fri, 2005-06-17 at 09:57 +0200, Alfons Adriaensen wrote:

> > On Fri, Jun 17, 2005 at 12:33:20AM +0100, Damon Chaplin wrote:
> >
> > > Out of interest, what APIs do you think GNOME and KDE should provide for
> > > sound?
> >
> > None. Why should a window manager / desktop provide its own API for
> > such things ?
>
> GNOME & KDE are complete development platforms, so they need to support
> the development of audio applications.

1. You don't need GNOME or KDE support to develop audio applications any
   more than you need their support for accessing files, the network, the
   display or whatever. So they should remain neutral on this matter.

2. Any application that can run only under a particular window manager
   or that depends on facilities from a particular desktop is IMHO just
   broken. The choice of window manager / desktop belongs to the user,
   not the developer.

> (I think both GNOME & KDE are considering switching audio APIs at the
> moment, so now is a good time for the linux-audio community to get
> involved.)

If everybody would just use ALSA for general use, and JACK for serious
music / sound applications, that would be fine. The last thing we need
is one more 'sound server / daemon'. (*)

-- 
FA
(*)<rantmode>
A few days ago I kicked up Rosegarden again to see if it could be useful
for the project I was starting. It wasn't so I terminated it, only to
find out later that there were still a number of KDE applications running,
including a sound daemon, blocking access to all others. Grrr.
</rantmode>
 
Received on Fri Jun 17 20:15:05 2005

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