Re: [linux-audio-dev] desktop audio resumed

On Wed, 2005-07-06 at 22:35 +0200, Christoph Eckert wrote:
> > > the thread, the sound
> > > daemons will automagically cease to exist once
> > > developpers realize there
> > > is no need for them. But it would be good to speed
> > > up the process.
> >
> > YES to that :-).
>
> The desktop soundservers will not disappear. KDE also runs on
> other platforms than Linux and they need the server to
> support multiple audio subsystems.
>

Bullshit, this has nothing to do with the sound server. Portability
does not mean that the exact same code must run on all supported
systems. It means that the platform-independent code must be cleanly
separated from the platform-dependent code.

So in your GNOME app you call gnome_play_sound(&filehandle) and the
Gnome middle layer snd_pcm_write()s it on an ALSA system, write()s
to /dev/dsp on an OSS system, and delivers it to the DirectSound or
whatever on Windows, depending on the system it was compiled for.

There's absolutely no need for the sound server, it's just bloat.

> So, the mess will persist. I'm really glad that the ALSA team
> has put efforts in DMIX and enabled it per default so
> multiple soundservers can coexist.

It would be really depressing if people actually got the idea that this
was OK "now that we have dmix". DMIX should be seen as a reason to
deprecate the sound servers.

Lee
Received on Thu Jul 7 16:19:28 2005