Re: Proposal: replacing esound with polypaudio in 2.10

[Lennart Poettering <mztabzr 0pointer de>]

On Thu, 28.10.04 18:47, Eugenia Loli-Queru (eloli hotmail com) wrote:

> 
> Does PolyAudio play well with alsa's software mixing plugin?

It probably does, although I haven't tested that. The current ALSA
driver doesn't make use of mmap() so I expect it to be compatible with
dmix. 

Just download it, compile it and test it. You'll see.

> Does Polyaudio automatically detects that it needs to use a special alsa 
> device instead of alsa directly, in order to provide software mixing
> and 

No, it doesn't detect that. But you can specify the ALSA device string
when loading the ALSA drivers. The default is "plughw:0,0", which
should be a default that works on most systems without problems.

> allow more than 1 app at the time to use the audio? If yes, would it play 
> well if the user loads a KDE app or an SDL game at the same time gnome with 
> polyaudio is loaded? What about a gstreamer app? If not, polyaudio would be 
> a major step back for many users today... Mixing needs to work 
> transparently across the board in the cases where no hardware mixing is 
> available...

Polypaudio (like esound, ort artsd) does audio mixing in software
anyway. There are native drivers for gstreamer, xmms, mplayer, libao
and portaudio. In addition all programs using the ESOUND protocol may
access a Polypaudio sound server. Therefore you won't have any
problems in using SDL, gstreamer and most other software
simultaneously. To get OSS compatibility you can use esound's esddsp
tool. This may be used to get artsd to run on top of polypaudio. That
way you can even run all KDE and Gnome programs in parallel - without
the use of any special Linux-only ALSA plugin.

Using the ALSA plugin will probably solve these problems four you as
well.

I must admit that I haven't tested artsd on esddsp on
polypaudio, howver I expect it to run without hassles.

Lennart

-- 
name { Lennart Poettering } loc { Hamburg - Germany }
mail { mzft (at) 0pointer (dot) de } gpg { 1A015CC4 }  
www { http://0pointer.de/lennart/ } icq# { 11060553 }