Re: patch to esound to use ARts (KDE sound subsystem) if it's running

[Elliot Lee <sopwith redhat com>]

On Mon, 20 May 2002, Vlad Harchev wrote:

> > The idea is aweful because of possibility for the two layers thing.
> 
>  Why two layers are that bad? There is no noticable difference when sound is
> passing through 2 layers (with this patch).

I think this might be because often apps can get away with accessing the 
audio "hardware" (in this case arts) directly and thus don't really go 
through two sound daemons.

It probably also depends on what type of system you are using. :)

> Arts support can't be made just a driver - currently given esd binary
> can't have several drivers compiled in since methods of the different
> drivers have the same name

Hmm, maybe this limitation needs fixing.

>  This is unacceptable. As Igor (the patch's author) says, this will work
> if esd is compiled with OSS driver only. It won't work if esd is
> compiled with most other drivers - most importantly ALSA.

>  Also as Igor says, even with OSS the artsdsp works very bad - the
> latency is noticable and sometimes the sound corrupts unacceptably -
> when playing games in under WINE (that uses esd playing via artsdsp)  
> sometimes sound disappears completely!

Well, it might be more beneficial to fix these problems in artsdsp (and
help programs that use neither libarts* nor libesd) rather than fix only
libesd-using programs.

> > . Getting esd to talk the arts protocol (not terribly likely) or artsd to 
> > talk the esound protocol (maybe more possible than with esd, since I am 
> > guessing the artsd source code is a little more modular than that of esd)
> 
>  This could be needed if the latency when esd is playing  via arts was
> unacceptable, but it doesn't, so the complication does't worse the efforts.

I don't think you are accurately estimating the severity of the problem on
a wide range of systems... Conceptually the chaining seems sort of ugly to 
me anyways, but I'm sure you'll find the best solution given all the 
constraints.

-- Elliot