Re: Sound Events and The Enlightened Sound Daemon

[Yo Ric Dude <ericmit ix netcom com>]

Mark Crichton wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 6 May 1998, Zach Brown wrote:
> 
> > there is a really cool synth style app in the works that does cool
> > realtime mixing and effects processing and such.. it needs low latency,
> > but can't know whats going to be mixed ahead of time..
> >
> 
> As for what NAS does, I'm not sure about that.  However, esd is still in
> development...which is good in this case.  I'm currently helping the
> primary author of esd to get the esd code into the CVS.  This "don't even
> attempt to cache this audio stream" is a pretty decent idea.

EsounD plays all client streams, only caching whatever data has already
been sent over the socket.  Also, client streams don't block each other,
so if your client misses a beat (so to speak =), no other clients should 
be affected.

> Also, Alan Cox also brought up a decent point that a fast lossless
> compression added to esd would be nice for those who want to pump 44100 Hz
> 16-bit stereo audio down the old pipe... ;)

Even lossy compression may be ok depending on what sound is played. 
Anyone 
else read Adaptive Delta Modulation in last month's Dr Dobb's and feel
like 
giving it a whack? =P  It would just be a new type (like stream or
sample) 
of data as far as the daemon is concerned.

> As for my personal preference.  I like esd because it sounds better.  When
> I played with NAS, the sound just broke up.  With esd, it's smoother, but
> it seems to add a nasal hiss to the final mixed output, but that, I think,
> is easily remedied.

Nasal hiss, eh?  I'll have to double check.  As far as NAS is concerned,
it 
may also be possible at this point to add NAS protocol handling as
well.  
I, too, have been unable to get reliable performance out of NAS under
Linux.
I've been informed that some source patching fixes it, but it also
concerns me 
that the *canonical* sources at ftp.x.org aren't ready for Linux, as is,
and
no patch was available after a night of web searching.

> And I'd really like to know what this synth app is...sounds interesting.
> ;)
> 
> Take care,
> Mark Crichton

-- ebm