Re: [LAD] linux audio standards base?

The following is all opinion which I think is what was requested:

> Here's an updated list of the possible official recommendations for
discussion:

We should not really be recommending anything and 'official' makes it sound rather orchestrated. We should be selling the benefits of the solution. If any attempt is made to mandate then we are going to run into reasonable resistance from both the apps and platform to any change as what is being proposed here increases compexity and abstraction of the audio interface which in anybodies book is a bad thing.

- A distribution should attempt to run jack as the default audio server
and should attempt to make the process pf starting jack easy for a non
technical user.

Why should a distribution do this? There are lots of reasons why they shouldn't.

- Pulseaudio should attempt to connect to jack by default and fall back
to the
alsa layer if jack is not running.

Why should pulse audio do this? There are lots of reasons why it shouldn't.

- Closed source binaries such as those provided by companies like
Adobe, Skype and Real Networks should provide flexibility for changing
the
audio library path and not be hardcoded to /usr/lib/

Why should they do this? Skype has 400M users, Adobe at least double that. Why should they make consideration for perhaps a small number of hundreds of users: those that want Linux, and Audio, and 64bit? You are welcome to change the figure of 'hundreds' into 'thousands' but nowhere on earth does it reach anything like the number of Skype users on 'another' platform. What are we offering Skype by way of a carrot to make them even consider this? You have to put the request into the perspective of it just being yet another request made of them and all of the other requests leading to potential financial benefits to their organisation. All Linux can offer Skype is a number of paying subscribers, and those that fit this specific demand are very small.

- For 32 Bit systems with memory of more than 8GB we recommend enabling
CONFIG_X86_PAE in the kerneld

The limit is theoretically 4G. Its a lot lower on pretty much all motherboards. If we put in any demands like this one it will sound like we have no idea about what we are talking about.

- For a 64 bit desktop system please ensure the 32 bit libraries for
alsa, jack and pulseaudio are installed by default.

Is this relevant? Are you asking for just the 32 bit libraries? Both of them?

If somebody put this proposal in front of me, personally, I would not give it the time of day. There is no justification, no benefit being offered, and no real necessity to do it. There is nothing compelling.

Nick.
Again, this was all opinion. The goal is a good one, the means don't quite seem to rise up to it.

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Received on Tue Aug 11 04:15:06 2009