[gobolinux-users] Audio recipe advisory

[Benjamin Bruheim]

Hi,

I did some research and wrote up a piece for the wiki. I would like
your comments on this:

ALSA has for a while supported audio mixing through the alsa dmix
plugin. With this in mind:

    * Always enable ALSA support.
    * You might even want to disable OSS support if the applications
resolves the default API the wrong direction.
    * If an application supports JACK, please enable this support and
add JACK to the dependencies.
    * esound (ESD) is legacy, as is ARTs. Do not make these required.
More on this below.
    * Some KDE apps do not work without ARTs. This is imho a bug from
their side.

I might want to add that there's a huge problem with KDE's ARTs deamon
that makes it hijack ALSA. For this --without-arts should be supplied
to the configure scripts for KDE packages (if it exists). There is
however a (current) side-effect of this; noatun will stop working,
thus movie previews will stop working (!!). This is to be fixed by KDE
4 or earlier.

ARTs and ESD is being replaced by Phonos and pulseaudio respectively.
Personally I think this is a move in the entirely wrong direction
since they are based on the idea that we really need soundservers at
all.  That aside, it is worth noting that Phonos will be the
replacement of all ARTs related stuff in KDE4; this is supposedly a
political move to end the ARTs fiasco already. :)
The pipe dream for the Linux Audio Development community is a sound
architecture that would allow its users to adjust volume for
applications independently and seamless internal routing between
applications. This is partly implemented with JACK, but it is still
some way off; especially when soundservers still are being actively
developed to cater for desktop users but not professionals. It seems
it is hard to get through the benefits for desktop users of a
completely professional architecture. However this discussion
continues endlessly.

And, lastly. What we sound-dudes love is low latency. Thus it is
recommended to use these patches:
http://people.redhat.com/mingo/realtime-preempt/
These allows latencies below < 30ms and makes linux a viable platform
for live playback. The inclusion of this patch is usually what sets
audio-distros apart from the rest. Now, if gobo was to have an
official set of patches applied ....

Sincerely,
Benjamin / phed^bernielomax