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

["Ian Burrell" <ianburrell gmail com>]

On 4/26/06, Debarshi 'Rishi' Ray <debarshi ray gmail com> wrote:
>
> If we get rid of ESD, and shift completely to GStreamer (using its output
> plugin for ALSA, SunAudio, etc.) would the following be possible:
>
> 1. Networked audio. Since there would be no sound server, does GStreamer or
> ALSA have the necessary features to handle it? Or does it need to be
> incorporated?
>
First, gstreamer has output plugins for ESD and arts which makes it
more flexible that the current method which can only talk to esd.  It
makes switching to other future network methods as easy as making a
new output plugin.

> 2. What about the API? Is the GStreamer API going to be notoceably more
> tougher than the ESD ones?
>
> I might be becoming repetitive, but I really want to know about this
> transition from ESD to GStreamer. More so, since it seems that ESD and
> GStreamer's domains do not completely overlap.
>

The change people are talking for gnome is for the simple sound
playing API in libgnome which is used for making event sounds. The
gnome_sound API can't be changed and will have to maintain binary
compatibility.  This will require patching some of the gnome programs
(including the sound event implementation) because the gnome_sound API
is not complete and programs needed to use the esd API directly for
caching samples.

Anything which does more advanced sound playing is likely already
using gstreamer or another media framework.  The only other gnome
program which I could find that was using the esd library directly was
the nautilus sound preview player.  It almost certainly should be
rewritten to use gstreamer; I bet it would be much simpler.

 - Ian