Re: Polypaudio for Gnome 2.10, the next steps

[Jeff Waugh <jdub perkypants org>]

<quote who="Mike Hearn">

> RhythmBox -> GStreamer

GStreamer is a fully featured multimedia library, which happens to include a
number of plugins for talking to various audio subsystems. The important
part of this equation is that Rhythmbox makes use of GStreamer's very fruity
multimedia architecture, which is its main feature. Most other applications
will *not* need a complete multimedia solution such as GStreamer to do their
dirty work.

>                        -> Polypaudio -> JACK

polypaudio -> simple API, includes network audio; JACK -> complex API. You
can talk to either, depending on your requirements.

>                                              -> ALSA -> Hardware

You cannot escape a driver level interface to the hardware, whether it's a
kernelspace or userspace driver. :-) Remember that ALSA is not all we have
to deal with here, there is also OSS, Solaris audio APIs, OS X APIs, Windows
APIs, etc.

> That's quite a lot of abstraction! Is it really necessary to have such a
> setup by default?

The two important APIs here are polypaudio (desktop, network) and JACK (for
pro audio, games, etc). Now, Lennart has noted that we need a better simple
audio API in general, and that polypaudio was not designed to be it, but
ignore that for the moment. :-)

- Jeff

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