Re: esound and playing mp3's ?

[Ronald de Man <deman win tue nl>]

> > there's ALSO 
> > esdctl off
> > esdctl on
> > where esd will respectively release its hold on /dev/dsp and the regain
> > it if it can.
> 
> And again I ask, why doesn't it do this automagically, since it has this
> capability?

I think one of the reasons that esd doesn't close /dev/dsp when no sound
is being played, is that starting and stopping the DMA often produce
a click. And I don't think it's possible for esd to detect that another
process is trying to open the device.

> 
> > why? there will just be a tiny wrapper scritp to run realaudio under
> > esd - it works here.
> > 
> > esddsp rvplayer
> > 
> > need i say more.
> 
> Yes.  What about third-party programs, installed via RPMs or the like, that
> don't supply such a wrapper sscript?

Start the app with

  esddsp app

Or put that in a one-line wrapper script yourself.

> 
> Again, I maintain, esd must play nice, automatically, with non-esd-compliant
> apps, or else people will not use it.  The burden should not be on each
> application's author to provide a way to coexist with esd.
> 
> > well if apps were written well and latency was an issue they coudl
> > happily upload samples to esd then tell esd to play then as needed.
> 
> And now we're back to 'you must be esd-compliant or else you face lesser
> performance.'  Not OK.

You must be esd-compliant or face lesser performance or not use esd.

> 
> And when a sound daemon did appear for E, it has ended up being much more
> analogous to Windows' old MMSYSTEM than to DAE.  This is great for playing
> kewl sounds in response to program events, and even for things like streaming
> audio and other consumer-level multimedia tasks.  But for film and audio work,
> where audio has to be synchronized at the sample level, this is not
> acceptable.

So at a professional level you either have to use applications developed
for esd, or not use esd at all. If you want a sound daemon that takes
audio from multiple sources and plays it through a single sound card,
and has to work with existing applications, how can you avoid a small
latency?

Ronald
(not an esd developer nor sound professional in any way :))