At 2004-01-29T17:40:49Z, "s. keeling" <keeling@spots.ab.ca> writes:
> If you ever figure out what esd is there for, I'd like to know. 'Til now,
> it seems everyone mentioning it is saying, "Once I killed esd, $blah
> started working."
Seriously? OK. ESD, the Enlightenment Sound Daemon, is a server that
programs connect to whenever they want to play a sound. There are a few
reasons for such a thing, but the main ones are:
1) The old-style /dev/dsp only allows one process to use it at a time.
You couldn't listens to MP3s and still get audio alerts from other
programs at the same time.
2) It serves as a compatibility layer to provide a standardized sound API
across multiple operating systems so that programmers wouldn't have to
know the intricacies of, say, Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris just to add
sound to their program.
3) Networking. You can run ESD on one computer attached to a good sound
system and point your client programs at that server to play their
sound. Very handy if you want a tiny, low-powered "sound server"
attached to your home stereo. For example, you could set XMMS to
stream audio to that computer so that you hear your MP3s on good
speakers, but still hear audio alerts on your PC speakers.
Having said that, almost everyone hates ESD because of various performance
and audio quality problems. KDE's "artsd" is generally regarded as a
superior replacement, although it also has its detractors.
--
Kirk Strauser
In Googlis non est, ergo non est.
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