From owner-freebsd-multimedia  Mon Nov  2 14:06:31 1998
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From: Luigi Rizzo <luigi@labinfo.iet.unipi.it>
Message-Id: <199811022003.VAA14984@labinfo.iet.unipi.it>
Subject: Re: How can we switch to a higher-level audio interface?
To: grady@xcf.berkeley.edu (Steven Grady)
Date: Mon, 2 Nov 1998 21:03:53 +0100 (MET)
Cc: multimedia@FreeBSD.ORG
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

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