New sound theme proposal for the 6.04 release

[crimsun at fungus.sh.nu]

On Tue, Oct 18, 2005 at 03:39:07PM -0400, Ivica Ico Bukvic wrote:
> My suggestion (FWIW) would be dropping esd in favor of ALSA's dmix plugin
> (although I am not sure whether Gnome can talk directly to ALSA layer
> without having an interim sound server/sink mechanism).

This approach will be discussed (cf. Martin Pitt's response to my post
earlier regarding dropping esd in favor of polypaudio or ALSA directly)
at UBZ, I presume (I can't attend due to lecture obligations).

I presume GNOME will continue to use Gstreamer - which can be
configured to use alsasink directly.

> The aforementioned Alsa dmix plugin comes with the Alsa lib package and is
> enabled by default. All the magic happens in the /etc/asoundrc file (users
> can furthermore overwrite the system settings in their own $HOME/.asoundrc
> files).

It would be better to approach the conffile similarly to the
abstraction that new users have via the GUI - that is, users shouldn't
have to know of the conffile's existence except in cases where there
are known-bad driver+hardware interactions.

Quite a few people who have dist-upgraded from Hoary to Breezy have run
into problems where their home-brewed conffile is "less smart" than
what alsa-lib now provides by default, resulting in the infamous "pops
and clicks", etc.

> The dmix plugin namely provides ability for multiple processes to
> concurrently access the soundcard. Alsa layer takes care of the rest. The
> utilization of this solution would have to depend on some kind of a database
> as some of the soundcards do provide hardware sound mixing ability (although
> they are more of an exception than a rule, such as the audigy/sb live!
> series) and therefore at least theoretically do not require neither the esd
> nor the dmix.

This is resolved upstream in ALSA. Three major issues that are still
"in progress" are allowing multiple users to dmix simultaneously,
simplifying the control layer, and allowing concurrent access via OSS
emulation.

> There are at least 4 other projects that do similar thing,
> such as libjackasyn (a.k.a. jacklaunch), oss2jack, and others, all of which
> act very similarly to esd (and/or asd and other similar hacks). They are
> IMHO a mixed bag but can prove to be a good interim solution should you guys
> decide to go with JACK.

JACK would introduce even more complexity, and while I think it's a
wonderful solution for its uses, Gstreamer's JACK plugin would need to
be mature by early 2006. None of those "hacks" should be considered as
interim solutions, because Dapper is going to be supported for much
longer than Warty, Hoary, and Breezy.

Cheers,
-- 
Daniel T. Chen            crimsun at ubuntu.com
GPG key:   www.sh.nu/~crimsun/pubkey.gpg.asc
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