Thanks for working on this Derek. Myself and all the other Scratchers running Linux are very grateful to have benefited from your stubbornness! :)
Your approach makes sense to me. One minor additional point in favor of a Gst plugin-- I would imagine that in future versions of PA the interface to gstreamer would figure prominently in testing / the QA process. They'd be more likely to invest resources to find / fix something that breaks the interface with gstreamer (and thereby breaks all the apps that depend on it) than something that just breaks Scratch. So I can imagine some benefit to being on that bandwagon. However - time and resources are scarce and precious! So it seems like trying to fix the PA plugin is the best approach. And who knows - maybe PA will get stable enough that they won't break the plugin again? One can dream... On Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 8:27 PM, Derek O'Connell <[email protected]>wrote: > 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 > > > -- _____ Amos
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