Re: More fun with sound (was GNOME CVS: libgnome martin)

[Tim Janik <timj gtk org>]

On Sun, 12 Aug 2001, George wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 10, 2001 at 10:12:50AM -0400, Joe Shaw wrote:
> > An argument against it, but along the same lines, is we should hold off
> > so we could play nicely with KDE's sound system if we can, ala the
> > .desktop format and the window manager spec.
> 
> Exactly.  So if I use esd in the panel, then people using apps that don't use
> esd are screwed.  If I use some other daemon ... same thing.  Not even if
> most things update, then the panel may still use esd.
> 
> That is CRAP!!!!
> 
> Let's judge these things from the view of the USER, not of the application
> developper.  The user is going to be pissed since things related to sound are
> going to suck a lot more in gnome2, just because we think the API is not
> "nice" or "perfect".
> 
> If the old api is left in place, most apps will use it cuz they don't care
> about any low level support for playing boings and bangs and swoosh sounds,
> and the user will still be able to configure sound nicely in one place.
> Also, if we ever bless some sort of a sound daemon, we can switch this API to
> use that sound daemon, and perhaps even deprecate it and tell people to use
> the sound daemon api directly.

i'm not really seeing people agreeing on one kind of sound-daemon, though at
guadec it looked like this could have been aRts.
i don't quite get what the problem is though, with just:
- keep the ability to trigger sound events in libgnomeui
- use a wrapper backend that supports multiple daemons or /dev/dsp

it looks like some people want to make it seem that either:
a) there's consensus that we should keep esd
b) there's consensus that the best option is to have no sound-support at all

which i both vehemently disagree with.

> Anyway, desktop kinds of sounds shouldn't be played directly by apps, but by
> the desktop libs, this is what libgnome is for anyway.  If I want to do a
> panel swoosh I should say:
> 
> gnome_play ("panel-swoosh");
> 
> And the user, theme or whatever configures that sounds gets it right.  And
> that's what currently happens, and that's what we're gonna lose apparently.
> 
> George
> 

---
ciaoTJ