Re: Debian policy on multimedia ?
Hi,
I'm preparing for notes on my LUG presentation, and I've been trying
out most of multimedia applications in Debian which I could put my
hands on.
I have a clearer view of the current state now that I think I can
comment much better.
> What about the idea of setting up a wiki somewhere? We could write
> something in advance, I've been thinking about some itens to be
> suggested to the policy:
>
> The basic principle, already mentioned by Junichi: Applications should
> have sane defaults in order to "just work" in most cases.
>
> That's reasonable, and from that I can derive that a jack application
> should connect to the first available phisical output port. Today's
> upload of zynaddsubfx will incorporate that.
This sounds reasonable; something to be in policy.
> In applications that support several output methods we should whenever
> possible give prefence to jack, falling back to other sound daemons,
> then alsa and oss as the last options to be tried.
Yes, this sounds resonable.
jack -> esd/arts/etc -> alsa -> oss
and for other sound daemons,
'iff they are already running' (probably started by GNOME/KDE desktop)
would be the expected behavior.
> We should enable session support to multimedia applications so that they
> will work easily together.
>
> We won't be able to find two users with tha same midi setup, when it
> comes to external modules and synths, but the individual setups do not
> change very often. It would be great if the user could have his studio
> setup recorded for later use, rather than having to connect lots of
> virtual midi output ports every time he logs in before being able to
> work.
I've been trying out ALSA MIDI setup since I noticed qjackctl does
provide a very good GUI for it.
Making every app to register a connection from vkeybd(input) /
zynaddsubfx(output) is the first thing I would do on my setup, since I
don't have a physical MIDI equipment right now.
I think there would be two options:
1. require every app to have a default synthesizer port, or have a
common documentation format so that it's easily machine-parsable
2. have a configuration file which dictates what input / output ports
they should be connected to per default.
LASH (Session handling) might be a bit trickier, since it's a newer
feature that will probably require much hacking. MIDI and jack has
been around for sooo long that we should probably document them.
LADSPA is mostly set in stone, and there shouldn't be too much
problems with documenting them.
I was pretty much impressed yesterday having stumbled upon this:
http://ubuntustudio.com/wiki/index.php/Welcome%2C_Musicians%21
I'm not sure who's behind this effort, but we might want to leverage
what's been already discussed there.
regards,
junichi
--
dancer@{debian.org,netfort.gr.jp} Debian Project
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