On April 21, 2004 04:49 pm, Ryan Underwood wrote:
It is also rather stupid that GNOME and KDE utilize incompatible sound servers. aRts feature set is a superset of esd's feature set, so it seems sensible for both environments to make use of that one, or to add a sound server specification to the freedesktop.org standards.
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 think it was Alan Cox who (first) made the observation that eventually the sound would need to be part of X11 (and hence the sound server part of the X server), otherwise you'll always have synchronisation issues between video and audio. Obviously arts is in the running for this, but the crucial part will be the protocol details, and no doubt all the other sound daemons will race to bolt themselves on to such a definition. If it's good enough for video cards ...
BTW, I believe this was going to be one of the major talking points at some upcoming desktop symposium in Ottawa, but unfortunately I don't have any details handy (I heard it over a beer with the guy who was organising it, but I didn't take notes :-).
Then again, which "free X project" would be first to develop this? <evil grin>
Cheers, Geoff