Re: disregard post re: sound!
On 2004-01-29, Kirk Strauser penned:
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> 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.
See, I thought I remembered that, but without arts or esd running, I was
able to play an mp3 on xmms while playing a cd on grip. I heard both
songs coming through the speakers. Well, I'm under the impression I had
neither running. I seem to have gstreamer-artsd installed, but no other
artsd stuff. I don't recall whether anything arts-related showed up in
the ps listing when I was running the above experiment.
> 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.
That's a good point.
> 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.
Ooh. I didn't know that. Does arts do this?
> 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.
Since you seem to actually understand all this stuff ...
How does alsa fit into all of this? If I have working sound drivers in
the kernel, should I care about alsa at all?
--
monique
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