>So what you are saying is "if we get everyone to switch to alsa and use >alsa properly, (i.e. writing apps which send buffered audio data to the >alsa-server in a timely fashion)" the need for a separate sound daemon >will disappear. Right?
Almost. "if we get everyone to switch to alsa, then everyone can share audio interfaces". "if we teach everyone how to use LD_PRELOAD and they accept it, then everyone can share audio interfaces without even switching to ALSA." "if we get everyone to switch to alsa, and they use the poll interface via ALSA to control their workflow, and/or only read/write avail_min chunks of data, then they'll be ready for their app to work in a synchronous execution system, of which JACK is an example." Just to keeps things complex, note that there is to stop a JACK server from accessing a shared ALSA interface - remember, there is nothing different in ALSA-using code whether its using a "hw" PCM device, a "plug" PCM device, or a "multi" (subset) PCM device, or a "shared" PCM device. the API is identical for all of them. --p