Offering a GStreamer-based alternative to gnome_sound in libgnome

[Philipp Kerling <k philipp gmail com>]

Hi,

it was discussed several times to port GNOME to use GStreamer instead of
ESD. Unfortunately no one actually did it. Now I tried to implement some
of the ideas mentioned in [1] and ended up with a DBus-based daemon that
loads the samples into memory and the clients can play them by using
their "keys" (e.g. gnome-2/login). The DBus approach also moves the
dependency of gstreamer out of the applications, only the daemon has to
be linked to it. I myself didn't like the idea of integrating it with
notify-daemon because the gnome_sound API was also used to play sounds
in games, therefore this "new" API will most likely do the same, and I
don't know if this really is the purpose of libnotify. I've opened a bug
report in GNOME bugzilla at [2] and attached my implementation [3]
including a few patches to some GNOME modules that used the gnome_sound
API. gnome-settings-daemon HEAD doesn't seem to work, but you can apply
the patches to the release versions. Everything is backwards-compatible
because I introduced a new API rather than changing gnome_sound. Please
try it and tell me what you think about this idea.

Kind regards,
Philipp Kerling

[1] http://live.gnome.org/GStreamer/esd
[2] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=445078
[3] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/attachment.cgi?id=89543