On Wed, Apr 21, 2004 at 05:41:34PM -0400, chmorgan@charter.net wrote:
like "play this wave file". The major remaining drawback >is latency; click on button in app, hear sound 2 seconds later when >scheduler
This is why we have sound servers like jack. Any delay is likely due to not having a fully callback based architecture in the app.
JACK doesn't provide the full functionality of a high level sound server. There is a reason for that; the functionality does not belong in a streams multiplexer like JACK. Nor does streams multiplexing functionality belong in a high level app. Trying to combine the two is why the sound servers have been such a huge source of frustration for users of the two major free desktop environments.
Maybe a better thing to do is rewrite arts/esd library >interfaces to omit the daemons altogether. That way the daemons can go >away, but the existing applications can be trivially migrated.
I've heard that arts is being phased out from kde use in the near future. I'm not sure what might replace it though.
Do you have a reference for that? aRts is rather full featured compared to the competition. Its only achilles heel is the fact that it has no low latency capability and that it suffers from blocking /dev/dsp like every other high level sound server at the moment.