On Wed, 21 Apr 2004 21:06:22 -0400, Paul Davis wrote:
if the freedesktop people have any intent of avoiding a split between the music world and the "desktop beep" world, JACK is the only viable sound server. if they don't care about such a split, then neither do most of us in the music/pro-audio world.
Obviously if possible such a split could be avoided, but the ultimatum seems to be: use JACK or there will be compatibility. That's fine, but I thought that JACK was Linux only (as is alsa, for that matter), so we lose the sound-server-as-abstraction-layer properties of esd and arts.
The other issue is - what about X sync? Do you agree with Alan Cox that X has to handle audio as well to make it work? If so that raises some fundamental questions about our audio architecture.
(a) PortAudio if platform portability matters
It does, but I've yet to encounter anybody outside the pro-audio world who's even heard of PortAudio let alone programmed against it for games, desktops, windows emulators etc.
It has been my intent to take these matters up with freedesktop.org, particular since two of its key members, Keith Packard and Jim Gettys, were on the panel that awarded JACK its Open Source Merit Award in January.
indeed. JACK is network protocol neutral. jackd itself does not (and will not) implement any network protocols (it doesn't even implement ALSA or OSS - thats handled by a special client), but it would be relatively easy to code an MAS client, or a low-level ethernet (Cobranet) client, or a client that uses 1394 as a transport protocol, or whatever. Just like JACK's other features, this kind of interconnectivity is *designed* to be provided by clients, seamlessly, not by the server.
Random observation - that location of policy (in clients) sounds a lot like X. Would it be theoretically possible to merge jack with the X server, or am I smoking crazy weed?
thanks -mike