Replacing esd with gstreamer

["Ian Burrell" <ianburrell gmail com>]

I was looking at http://live.gnome.org/GStreamer/esd. I did some
investigation and I think I see how this can be accomplished.  My
impression is that the principal goal is migrating the simple sound
playing API in libgnome to use gstreamer to play sound files and
samples. I am volunteering to make this happen.

There are a few places in gnome CVS which are using esound interface
directly.  The gnome-session, gnome-settings-daemon, and libgnomeui
are involved with managing the daemon and gconf key for it.  I am
guessing that if esd was not needed, then this could be removed.  It
might need to be kept for compatibility.

nautilus contains an audio preview player which uses esd and audiofile
directly. It does rate conversion and other complicated stuff.  I
suspect porting it to gstreamer would make it simpler.

The other places which used esound library directly were calling
esd_sample_free, esd_sample_getid, and esd_sample_play.  Basically,
the gnome_sound interface is not complete enough to work with samples.
 I think these uses can be removed by extending the gnome_sound API to
include gnome_sound_sample_free, gnome_sound_sample_getid, and
gnome_sound_sample_play functions.

The samples are stored in the esd server itself.  My feeling is that
it would be acceptable to load the samples in the application and not
share them.  It might make sense to have an interface in gstreamer to
load samples into different sound servers and play them but I don't
think that is required for the migration.

 - Ian