Re: [Cooker] Proposal for 2008.0: PulseAudio as default

[Fabrice FACORAT]

Le vendredi 16 février 2007, Adam Williamson a écrit :
> 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 =)

+1

However, if all sound drivers finally have dmix support in 2008.0, do we 
really need to have a sound server ? Of course there's the sound throught 
network part, but after ? ability to control volume individually from each 
application ? KDE 4 will be able to do it ...


-- 
L'infini, Dieu est comme une droite sans limites,
le fini comme un cercle. Et c'est dans
ce cercle que l'homme, péniblement se meut.
Pierre Reverdy