Re: NAS vs. ESD (not a troll!)

[Ronald de Man <deman win tue nl>]

On Sun, Aug 22, 1999 at 04:37:06PM -0500, Eric Gillespie, Jr. wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 22, 1999 at 08:21:11PM +0200,
> Thomas Hedler <thomas.hedler@fen.baynet.de> wrote:
> > I think you know many things than me.
> > Can you concrete list some features nas can that esd can't or give me
> > some links to read. Because I am interested in music and computers
> > this one is very important for me.
> > 
> 
> Actually, no, I don't. The reason I was asking is that esd has no
> documentation and it didn't look like it worked over a network like nas
> and X. I was wrong. Also, someone said nas does not work in real time,
> whereas esd does. So it looks like esd is the right choice.

However, esd is going to be replaced. According to the gnome-devel
archive, the code is horrible, and its API is ok for most applications,
but not for all. Don't ask me for details :)

Oh, it won't be replaced by nas, and the magic new sound server
will have a wrapper for esd (and maybe for nas too, but I don't know
about that).

Anyway, as far as I'm concerned, I won't regret losing esd, since
it has always given me horrible sound quality, plus it somehow
degraded my cpu performance. (With esd running my computer is a lot
slower, even when esd isn't playing any sound at all, and just waiting
on a select(). Playing a .wav file doesn't slow down my computer at
all.) Nobody else suffered from this slow down, though.
(And to be fair, the sound is reasonable as long as the sample
rates of esd and the sample being played are the same. But even
then, I get lots of skips.)

Ronald