Re: Some writing about sound

[Jurgen Botz <jurgen botz org>]

Tom Tromey wrote:
> Ville> 	-Base API to NAS which has been here for years. And also it
> Ville> has sopport in some app's (like mpg123)
> Ville> 	-NAS is network transparent which is added plus.
> 
> [ The followups list many reasons not to use NAS: hard to port, works
>   poorly on Linux, etc ]
>[...]
> * Protocols.  Is the NAS wire protocol inherently bad?  Ignore the

I think it's important to look at the work that's already been done
with NAS, and also there was some work done by the X Consortium to
integrate sound into X (the "broadway" release) that didn't get 
finished before the Consortium ended.  I think there is a paper 
about this around somewhere... Anyway, I think it's important to
look at this because someone has already learned a lot of things
in developing this stuff, no doubt.

But is a network-transparent sound protocol really what we want?  The
network transparency part brings its own set of issues that complicate
thing in way we might just not want to deal with because we don't
need it.

NAS was written by a guy at NCD, a company that made X terminals.
If you're using an X terminal, then the only way you're going to get
sound out of your Apps running on some remote host is with a network
transparent sound service, obviously.  But X terminals are history.
Now, I think the network transparency of X is great because I can
occasionally run programs on other machines and display on mine, but
I can't think of a single application I've ever run over X when /not/
working on an X terminal, which would have benefitted much from sound.

In short, network transparent sound service would be nice for 
completeness sake, but I think we can solve 99% of the needs without
it... so if it makes things a lot harder, I don't think it's worth it.

All that said, however, I do want to reiterate the importance of
building on existing work and learning from others experiences.

--
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 \_/ u r g e n  /_ _) o t z      "Unix?  What's that?  Is that like Linux?"