From: Eric Pouech eric.pouech@wanadoo.fr Date: 2002/10/08 Tue PM 03:48:04 EDT To: Chris Morgan cmorgan@alum.wpi.edu CC: wine-devel@winehq.com Subject: Re: jack audio driver
Chris Morgan a écrit :
I have an audio driver for the jack audio server, http://jackit.sourceforge.net. This is a callback based server, so each time the server needs audio data it executes a client callback function. I was wondering if there was any interest in having this driver as part of mainline wine code as an example of how to write a wine audio driver for a callback based architecture.
well, it depends what you look at jack way well be the standardized API for audio application interoperability on Linux but, some folks may argue that arts may well become the same as of today, I don't like the number of sound drivers that we already have (OSS, alsa, arts, nas) just for linux it, of course, reflects the mess in low level audio interface in linux
It really is a mess. It seems clear that we should do away for the most part with having applications interface directly with sound drivers like oss/alsa, and instead go through sound servers like arts/jack/etc. In technical aspects a callback based architecture is far superior to a polling based architecture. It has a lower latency and enforces a cleaner sound implementation on applications. What I haven't seen yet is a widely used audio server that people agree upon. Someone really needs to take the lead and start pushing a callback based sound server that is under active development(arts appears not to be) that is not kde/gnome specific.</rant>
what I really fear is the real maintenance of those drivers as of today, OSS is maintained, I cannot really tell the same for the others it's never a bad idea to share code, but I fear we're not going to be able to maintain all the drivers (but we don't maintain them all today anyway) so go for it (sorry for thinking while writing ;-)
Wonder when we can phase out the OSS driver and concentrate on the ALSA one. Seems like a waste to support two drivers that fulfill the same role.
Chris
It really is a mess. It seems clear that we should do away for the most part with having applications interface directly with sound drivers like oss/alsa, and instead go through sound servers like arts/jack/etc. In technical aspects a callback based architecture is far superior to a polling based architecture. It has a lower latency and enforces a cleaner sound implementation on applications. What I haven't seen yet is a widely used audio server that people agree upon. Someone really needs to take the lead and start pushing a callback based sound server that is under active development(arts appears not to be) that is not kde/gnome specific.</rant>
for me, the decision item isn't technical beauty of an interface vs an other, it's which API are currently widely spread and used as of today, OSS is there and remain the most deployed (even distros now ship with ALSA, most of them ship 0.5 interface (and better stay with OSS than with this one); and the installed based is widely ALSA)
IMO, the only real choices are: - short term OSS - mid term: ALSA (to replace OSS) - long term: what ever streaming API remains on Linux (I'd bet for jack)
A+
-
chrismorgan＠rcn.com -
Eric Pouech