Date: Mon, 2 Nov 1998 21:03:53 +0100 (MET) From: Luigi Rizzo <luigi@labinfo.iet.unipi.it> To: grady@xcf.berkeley.edu (Steven Grady) Cc: multimedia@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: How can we switch to a higher-level audio interface? Message-ID: <199811022003.VAA14984@labinfo.iet.unipi.it> In-Reply-To: <199811022025.MAA29067@hub.freebsd.org> from "Steven Grady" at Nov 2, 98 12:26:07 pm
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> [Summary: the current standard of interacting directly with the > audio device sucks. What approach can we take to improve it, > if any?] > > As I've been experimenting more with various audio-related pieces > of software in the last few months, I've become more and more > concerned with the fact that there is an increasing body of software > that uses a _really_ broken approach to sound, namely, to open the > device directly. This has three serious problems: it doesn't work > over the network, only one application at a time can play a sound, > and it is a low-level API. All of these problems used to exist > for graphics, which was of course why X was developed. > > There have been various solutions proposed -- the Network Audio > Server is probably the most advanced, but development/maintenance there is one big problem with audio: unless video, you want real time response and a userspace server cannot always help you, let alone the jitter and losses you can have with a networked audio server. Also, there is no equivalent of the "current window"/"input focus" for audio: all output is mixed together. This in my opinion explains why no equivalent of X has become a standard. cheers luigi To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-multimedia" in the body of the message
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