Re: ESD, aRts, ALSA, OSS, and GStreamer

["Ronald S. Bultje" <rbultje ronald bitfreak net>]

Hi,

On Mon, 2006-04-24 at 17:49 +0530, Debarshi 'Rishi' Ray wrote:
> FAQ at the GStreamer project page says : "Streamer is not a
> soundserver. GStreamer does however have plugins supporting most of
> the major soundservers available today, including ESD, aRTSd, and to
> some extent Jack. Support for MAS is also planned". If that is so,
> then how can it replace ESD?

ESD basically has two functions in GNOME nowadays. Sound device sharing,
and being a public API for portable audio file handling (together with
libaudiofile).

The second one, portable audio file handling, can be taken over by a
media framework no matter what, and it would do a much better job than
esd/libaudiofile do. The first one is more complex to understand at
first. However, what a media framework such as GStreamer would do here,
is to provide choice. Most people don't need ESD, since their hardware
supports multiple inputs. A lot of people don't need it since they want
to use alsa/dmix instead of esd. For the few that need it, they could
use esd via GStreamer. With GStreamer, you wouldn't we stuck with a
flawed API that you don't want, but you'd have the choice of using alsa
directly if you care (or oss, for the BSD people, etc.).

Hope this clears thing up,

Ronald