Re: Some writing about sound

[Caolan McNamara <Caolan McNamara ul ie>]

On 08-May-98 Jurgen Botz wrote:
>Tom Tromey wrote:

< chomp> 

>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.

1) networked audio is rather a useful item to have, e.g i run a pig
of an x app that i use for audio work, i would much rather run it
on a remote machine thats far more powerful than mine with a bucket
load more memory, but i cant as it opens /dev/audio so i must run it 
on mine. For all the same reasons that X network ability is good so
too is networked audio. I can understand that when you run linux on a 
standalone machine that the networked ability of X and nas appear trivial,
but when you work in a large organisation/university where the network is
paramount, the inability to play sound from a remote machine is incredibly
irritating, i can interoperate apps from all machines, run solaris apps that
arent available for linux onto my box etc etc, but when i go to play a quick
do-de-doo, to show that mail has arrived the whole model falls apart.

2) sound apps should be able to run together, one solution is to have a sound
server that the apps communicate with, this mechanism is really needed for
apps on the same machine to share the sound device, why not use sockets for the
client-server communication and get network transparent while you are at it ?

not having a networked audio protocol that apps can use would be a pain. 
its not just a matter of completeness, but audio *is* becoming more important
with ui designers (well i bloody hope so or my masters work is doomed already),
theres work underway to audio-enhance graphical components, so its not at all
far-fetched to imagine that gtk would benefit from audio enhancement,
( trivial java 1.1.2 demo at
http://www.csn.ul.ie/~caolan/docs/sound/button.html )
what would be worse than using such a system, then running your beautiful
audio enhanced GNOME desktop from a remote machine and getting silence.
id very strongly argue that not having a networkable sound system would detract
greatly from GNOME, the benefits involved in networking audio outweigh the
additional difficuly in doing it.

whew, anyhow got that off my chest.

C
 
Real Life: Caolan McNamara           *  Doing: MSc in HCI
Work: Caolan.McNamara@ul.ie          *  Phone: +353-61-202699
URL: http://skynet.csn.ul.ie/~caolan *  Sig: an oblique strategy
Imagine a caterpillar moving