Re: [orca-list] audio and pulseaudio: was: Re: Punctuation, capital letters, exchange of characters and strings, generally error in the design of Orca

[Jason White <jason jasonjgw net>]

On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 12:59:45PM +0100, Michael Whapples wrote:
> To me none of those features really seems to offer much more than can be
> achieved with stuff which already existed, but may be there is something
> technical about it which is an advantage and I may understand given an
> example.

I think the main advantage is that it provides all of those features in one
convenient client/server interface. Low latency and real-time priorities are
supposed to be handled as well, which should make it good for audio editing
and recording tasks for which Jack is commonly used now. It can pipe audio
over a network as well, combine multiple sound cards, perform resampling, etc.
Furthermore, this is supposed to be compatible with Alsa and (to some extent
at least) OSS applications.

I suspect what has happened is that distribution maintainers have been
awaiting a single, common solution for handling audio - and several of them
have decided that Pulse Audio is it.

As for the complexity, that's what distribution packages exist to handle and
to render invisible.