Sound stuff (sound in gnomine!)



Hi,

I have made an implementation of sound support in gnomine using
EsounD. Patch and some sounds can be found here:

http://www.sdf.se/~simon/gnomine-sound.html

As you'll see, this is *not* code that should go into the tree, just
a hack to try the idea and for me to test EsounD. However, I would like
to do this for real if that's ok. But there are some issues that
needs to be discussed first... (if some of these things have already
been discussed, please tell me what conclusions were made..)

1. A user that has no sound support on his system shouldn't have to
   bother with EsounD to play gnomine (or use GNOME in general).
   Ok, add some autoconf test. The user using precompiled binaries
   (RPM, deb...) will need to install EsounD, though, but he/she
   will not have to run the EsounD server - when the client can't
   connect to the server, it falls back to use /dev/dsp directly.
   (In the case of this gnomine patch, which uses cached samples
   on the server, this doesn't work. [right, ricdude?])

2. GNOME apps need some way to read and write common sound file formats
   such as WAVE, AIFF and AIFF-C. There is a free implementation
   of the SGI audiofile library available at:

   http://www.68k.org/~michael/audiofile/

   For an example on how to use this with EsounD:

   http://www.sdf.se/~simon/esdplay.html

   I suggest we use this library. It's beta, and needs some work,
   but it's a nice API and it can also be useful in porting SGI specific
   apps. It's also GPL'ed. I have no problems with that, but someone
   posted about "libraries should be LGPL'ed" - is this a common
   opinion for the GNOME developers? (RMS talked about this subject again
   in the recent some.net interview, probably audiofile fits into what
   he thinks should be LGPL'ed - replacements for existing libraries.)
   
   If so, the author said he could change.

3. Is ${prefix}/sounds/appname a good place to store sounds?

4. If some general GNOME sound event stuff got written, apps such
   as gnomine could use that (we'd want the user to be able to easily
   set his/her own sounds anyway). This is probably not a good idea
   though..?

Ok, that's all. Thanks for your attention. :)

-- 
Simon Kågedal <simon@sdf.se> - Homepage: http://www.sdf.se/~simon/



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