[Cooker] Proposal for 2008.0: PulseAudio as default

[Adam Williamson]

Thought I'd get this in early.

Want to propose exactly what's written in the topic: use PulseAudio
(http://www.pulseaudio.org) as the system-wide default sound server in
2008.0.

For those who don't know about it, Pulse was written (originally called
PolypAudio) as a replacement for esd in GNOME, but it's grown into quite
an impressive project. It does the basic job of a sound server (mix
audio streams from various apps together, output a single stream to the
sound driver) extremely well, including advanced stuff that esd and arts
never coped with (e.g. analog surround sound). It is well designed (for
example, it doesn't resample unless it's actually necessary to combine
two streams at different sample rates). It has very good support: it has
a wrapper named padsp for applications that only output to OSS - our
soundwrapper script could be modified to call this where appropriate -
it replaces esd transparently, there is an ALSA library in the
alsa-plugins package which can be used together with a modified
~/.asoundrc to direct all native ALSA output to the pulse daemon, and
there are native pulse plugins for several apps and frameworks (there's
a gstreamer pulse sink which means all gstreamer apps can output
natively to pulse, there's plugins for audacious, libao, mpd, xine, and
xmms. There's a library which implements native pulse output support for
Flash 9 ( http://pulseaudio.revolutionlinux.com/ ). For KDE apps, arts
can be set to output to esd (and therefore, when pulse is installed,
actually to pulse). There'll be a less hacky way to do this when KDE 4
is out, but KDE 3 is basically stuck with arts.

This means pulse with a correct configuration really can handle just
about all sound output on a regular Linux system (major exceptions ATM
are audacity and RealPlayer 10). This would give us a well-designed,
modern sound server which _actually works_ (in stark contrast to esd)
and which has some very neat features like hotplugging of audio sources
and easy network streaming with avahi (zeroconf stuff). It would go a
long way to eliminating a lot of headaches we currently have with audio,
especially with the further development that will have been done by the
time of 2008.

All in favour, raise your speakers =)
-- 
adamw