Hi all, I have been updating myself on PA issues. Last time I looked (~December) Lennart Poettering had disappeared on holiday while quite a few people were having problems on Karmic with the Simple_API (which I use in the Scratch plug-in). The problem boils down to default latency being ~2s, much too long for most app's, and not easily controlled via Simple_API (my attempts failed at least). The volume meter set a low latency in order to display the current sound level/s so that's why things improved for other app's when it was running.
The problems were created by an internal change to the PA API (supposedly one single flag setting!) between 9.04 / 9.10 and the good news is that it's impact is at least now recognised. There seems to be some new suggestions about how to get around the problem, including a patch to set latency via an env var. So tomorrow I will see how far I can get with them. The bad news is there seems to be new problems introduced by the version of PA to be used in Lucid. Fingers crossed they get sorted soon. Re GStreamer, the hope was/is that a GSt based plugin for Scratch would avoid these issues but thinking about it there is no guarantee since GSt itself relies on plugin's to interface with whatever sound server is in use. On Ubuntu that will still be PA out-of-the-box. PA can of course be shut down and bypassed but the ideal solution is one that avoids forcing what may be *novice* users from having to reconfigure their system just to run Scratch (auto shutdown/start-up of PA is not an option for other reasons). So it makes sense to me to concentrate on working around current PA issues before considering GSt, although GSt is still attractive for the other options it brings to the table, as well as isolating Scratch from specific sounds systems, ie, more platform/distro independence. Btw, I don't claim to be an expert on any of the above, more like too stubborn to know when to give up ;-) So if anyone else has expertise/ info/ advice I'm happy to hear it. -D _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~scratch Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~scratch More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
