Sound Events and The Enlightened Sound Daemon

["Yo 'Ric Dude" <ericmit ix netcom com>]

Greetings, all.

Responding to an anonymous tip from a list member, 
I saw someone had posted my announcement concerning the 
Enlightened Sound Daemon in the archives, and figured 
I'd jump right in.  Program details may be found at
http://www.netcom.com/~ericmit/EsounD.html

A previous post had classified sound-capable applications
into two catagories:  inherently sound enabled apps
(synthesizers, waveform editors/players, etc.) and apps 
that use sound as an extra (e.g. the mines game could
actually go *boom* if you hit a mine.

Concerning the inherently sonic apps:  EsounD has a simple
way to play audio streams.  Basically a socket to the 
server is opened, and as long as data is dumped into the 
socket, that stream is played via the server.  Multiple
streams are mixed by the server.  If the server is not 
available, the client program can use /dev/dsp to play
the audio stream as a fallback.

Concerning the sound-extra programs:  EsounD can "cache"
samples in the server, for later playback by id number.
A client program can maintain a map of event-ids to 
sample-ids (e.g. in the mines game, event boom would 
corresponds to say, sample-id #4).  Perhaps a simple 
array, indexed by an enumerated event type would 
suffice. An earlier post had suggested a gtk sound 
configuration dialog box, to customize sounds for a 
given application.  This dialog box can then be rigged 
up to cache and uncache sounds in the server as needed.

I realize that much of this functionality is duplicated
in the NAS (network audio system) library, however, after
a night of fiddling, I cannot get the NAS au server to
play back sounds for longer than a few seconds, let alone
mix several audio streams simultaneously.  Maybe it's 
just a NAS on Linux thing, but I can't tell.

At any rate, I'd be honoured to contribute the Enlightened 
Sound Daemon to the Gnome project.  Please let me know 
how I can help out.

-- ebm
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