AudioServer Standard?

[Stefan Westerfeld <stefan space twc de>]

   Hi!

Currently, there were some discussions on kde-core-devel regarding what
should be the audio server for KDE 2.0. I suggested aRts (well, I wrote
it, so I think it's a great thing... ;), another solution would be
KAudioServer2 and the third solution would be ESD.

On the other hand, while the first two choices may be better from a
technical point of view, they could in their current implementation
lead to deep incompatibilities between Gnome and KDE, because they
would only allow apps of one of the desktops to run.

While it has been suggested that one could simply make KAudioServer2
and aRts send their output to esd, I don't think that solution is
realistic, at least not for aRts.

This is since aRts can offer real good latency values for realtime
apps, such as harddisk recording, realtime midi synthesis or full
duplex effect processing. Playing (and recording) through esd would
effectively make the latency much much higher, making all of the above
pratically useless.

A possible solution would be to standarize to a common audio server
protocol. That way, people running ESD would be able to use most apps,
that do not rely on the more complex features (flow graphs, etc.) that
aRts offers. On the other hand, people running aRts could use the ESD
based apps, and the special aRts features as well.

So the question is: is there anybody maintaining esd, or would anybody
be willing to work with me on that. I could probably do most of the
documentation work, but it would be good to have a kind of commitment
that the two programs will remain compatible.

It's useless if you have aRts speak the ESD protocol, and two days later
ESD2 comes out with another protocol. Well, I already contacted
ricdude@toad.net, but got no answer until now.

URLs

  - esd   http://www.tux.org/~ricdude/EsounD.html
  - aRts  http://linux.twc.de/arts

Any feedback is appreciated.

   Cu... Stefan

PS: If somebody wants to work on making the aRts GUI elements work on both,
Gtk & Qt or to make aRts compile against both, mico & ORBit, please contact
me, I'd be happy to see that.
-- 
  -* Stefan Westerfeld, stefan@space.twc.de (PGP!), Hamburg/Germany
     KDE Developer, project infos at http://space.twc.de/~stefan/kde *-