Hi,
> 1. You don't need GNOME or KDE support to develop audio > applications any more than you need their support for > accessing files, the network, the display or whatever. So > they should remain neutral on this matter. I absolutely agree. But why did they start to use arts/esound/gstreamer? Because they wanted to ensure that multiple applications can play sounds at the same time. What chance did they have to use a commonly accepted soundserver? None. There was no soundserver and no softwaremixing, and less people had (and still have) an audio card with hardwaremixing. > 2. Any application that can run only under a particular > window manager or that depends on facilities from a > particular desktop is IMHO just broken. The choice of > window manager / desktop belongs to the user, not the > developer. Yep. > > (I think both GNOME & KDE are considering switching audio > > APIs at the moment, so now is a good time for the > > linux-audio community to get involved.) > > If everybody would just use ALSA for general use, and JACK > for serious music / sound applications, that would be fine. > The last thing we need is one more 'sound server / daemon'. > (*) Agreed. arts isn't maintained anymore, so KDE is looking for a replacement (like gstreamer). Because there's no common soundserver for all applications, they will need to make a decicion. Which audio subsystem should they support? ALSA direct access is no choice because it blocks the device. DMIX is a choice, but what if I want to use JACK simultaneously without using DMIX? JACK could become a common audio server but still it isn't. Any recommendation which audio system a programmer should use? > (*)<rantmode> > > A few days ago I kicked up Rosegarden again to see if it > could be useful for the project I was starting. It wasn't > so I terminated it, only to find out later that there were > still a number of KDE applications running, including a > sound daemon, blocking access to all others. Grrr. Welcome in the Linux audio world ;-) . BTW: Arts has a timeout mode so it'll free the device as soon it isn't needed for more than the entered time. Thanks & best regards ce