linuxaudio.org

Hi,
2005/7/29, Mark Constable :

quoted text
> Apparently aRts could be removed from KDE4 CVS HEAD RSN. As far

> as I know there is no decision on an official replacement yet.

> I have no say in the matter but I would like to see something

> like qjackctl ported to KDE4 and usable from within kcontrol,

> basically, Jack embedded into the system from the ground up.

> My general question, to those who know far more than me, is

> just what would be the ideal sound subsystem for KDE in 2006

> seeing there is a clean slate and an opportunity to get it

> right from the get go ?

You should subscribe to kde-multimedia@kde.org and ask the question there.
The short answer is: KDE doesn't need jack or portaudio or alsa. It

needs a soundsystem or even better a sound-api which it can tell "play

me file XYZ", "play video YQ with the sound going through that filter

and with that volume". These are things that basic alsa/jack/portaudio

can't do.

The obvious answer would be xine/mplayer/gstreamer/arts. The

experience with aRts tells use not to focus on one soundsystem and get

lost if that is not maintained anymore. Thats why the

kdemultimedia-devs (Matthias Kretz, Scoot Wheeler and some more)

decided to create a layer between the running soundservers and the

KDE-apps. This has the advantages that the normal KDE-dev doesn't care

about what system is underneath. And that KDE can change the default

soundserver (or even the distributions can change the default).

Gstreamer will probably be the first choice for the default server but

there are also tests with NAS, NMM, xine and some more going on...
Please say good-bye to the thought of jack as the soundserver for

everything. Jack is for professional raw datastreams with very little

latency. For the typical desktop-app/game its irrelevant how much

latency there is (if its not 2 secs) but it wants to play mp3 without

thinking about encoding it...
And yes, I am an official kde-mm-developer, I wrote KRec and do the

translation of the gui and docs into german. And I suffered with aRts

from the devels view...
Arnold
PS: For more info see http://vir.homelinux.org/talks/kdemm/lt2005/
--

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