Re: Polypaudio for Gnome 2.10, the next steps

[Mike Hearn <mike navi cx>]

On Wed, 24 Nov 2004 02:24:05 +0100, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> There's "esddsp" which works fine with polypaudio, and I am planning
> to add a new native tool "paoss". With that and the ALSA plugin I get
> compatibility with virtually every Linux sound application, since OSS
> and ALSA are the most common sound APIs on Linux and Unix.

OK.

> Besides the pure audio samples you need to pass some meta data like
> timing info and control data. This requires more work than simply
> writing audio data to a socket. The plugin I have in mind utilizes the
> normal polypaudio client libraries and behaves like a normal
> polypaudio client. And that is far from being easy with the current
> internal ALSA plugin API.

Would it be possible to multiplex this data into a simple socket protocol?

> As far as I know there already is something similar: you can use an SysV
> SHM based plugin to pass audio data between applications. See
> http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/alsa-lib/pcm_plugins.html and look
> for "plugin: shm".

Yeah I've seen this but the ALSA docs are up to their usual high quality
and I never figured out what it did or how to use it :)

OK well you win :) I have no arguments left, you seem to have addressed
them all. I quite liked the thinness of having apps able to write direct
to the hardware in the presence of a good card and no network but I guess
you can still have that with Polypaudio especially if there is an ALSA
plugin. That way you can centrally configure it all, without having to
alter driver settings for many programs. And it seems there are many
issues to do with latency and timing that I don't understand and did not
address in my proposal.

I still vote for having Polypaudio in the GNOME desktop. Otherwise the
same arguments will just be had by distro vendors over and over. But OTOH
as there is apparently little consensus in this area anyway maybe it's
best to let different distros try different approaches.

thanks -mike