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Linux sound is a steaming pile
- icey 17y agoI don't understand the "(not worth reading)" at the end of your headline.
- illumen 17y agoSorry, updated headline.
- GiraffeNecktie 17y agoAnd why use the words "steaming pile" (i.e. a pile of shit) when that's not what the article says. Very confusing.
- icey 17y agoIn retrospect, it looks like this guy is just blogspamming. Nothing to see here.
- ars 17y agoLinux sound is broken IMO till it travels seamlessly over remote connections, just like a mouse and a screen do. X handles Mouse and Keyboard and Screen I/O, and there is no reason sound should not be considered a basic I/O that should go too. Just add another Section "InputDevice" or xorg.conf, and OutputDevice as well. Each Xserver will list the specs it can handle (frequency/bitrate/channels), and clients will either adjust themself to the capabilities of the server, or pick some master format and convert on the fly as needed.
- bokchoi 17y agoThis fellow created XAudio as an X11 extension: http://www.chaoticmind.net/~hcb/murx/xaudio/ http://www.chaoticmind.net/~hcb/murx/xaudio/
- windsurfer 17y agoBut sound shouldn't go over the same connection as your mouse and keyboard all the time. I currently use Pulseaudio to stream my sounds from both my laptop and desktop to an always-on server hooked up to a stereo. Xorg would be out of place for that kind of sound transport.
- anigbrowl 17y agoThere is already a protocol for this, though not in X. (Edit - well yeah, that's the point you were making, sorry. But this may be of interest anyway) It's quite robust and used in a number of commercial applications, like Reaktor. Unfortunately it seems to have exactly zero traction with hardware manufacturers. http://opensoundcontrol.org/introduction-osc http://opensoundcontrol.org/introduction-osc JACK is pretty good too...but I see your point. Audio development on Linux fragmented several years ago - LADSPA vs ALSA was the start of that, IIRC - and although it's fairly robust today, almost everything feels years behind the Windows/Mac platforms. Video is even worse. For anyone but experimental artists or those with an in-house development team, it doesn't offer much of a platform for commercial work and is likely to scare potential clients away.
- wmf 17y agoSupposedly if you enable the PulseAudio module-x11-publish option, audio will be forwarded correctly over the network.
- sandGorgon 17y agois it really about network sound ? 95% of the desktop users needs sound to work [a] when two streams (e.g. a video game and music) are played [b] low latency sound in video games (a.k.a lipsync) Another 4% wants good audio tools to work on in Linux - which there arent many of. I dunno if this is a catch-22 because of the innumerable sound SDKs. In a previous comment I had posted described Jonathan Blow's (creator of Braid) problems with low latency sound and APIs on Linux. And this is a guy who has been using linux for over a decade now. The thread over at his blog has been going for over a year now (http://braid-game.com/news/?p=364 http://braid-game.com/news/?p=364) and makes for interesting reading.
- RyanMcGreal 17y agoSound has been my one big disappointment since moving to Linux. I cannot believe how broken it is - a hodge-podge of half-built mini tools that don't play nice together and don't add up to anything close to a decent audio environment. I installed Rosegarden on Ubuntu 9.04 with high hopes, but after hours of monkeying around with it, it flat-out will not play music. Likewise, I installed timidity and what I had read was a kick-ass soundfont, only to discover that about a third of the instruments are simply missing. Arrgh!
- windsurfer 17y agoGnome's new sound manager is wonderful, and Timidity works great in 9.10 :)
- RyanMcGreal 17y agoGreat news! Just a month to go...