Hi, 2005/7/29, Mark Constable <markc@xxxxxxxxx>: > Apparently aRts could be removed from KDE4 CVS HEAD RSN. As far > as I know there is no decision on an official replacement yet. > I have no say in the matter but I would like to see something > like qjackctl ported to KDE4 and usable from within kcontrol, > basically, Jack embedded into the system from the ground up. > My general question, to those who know far more than me, is > just what would be the ideal sound subsystem for KDE in 2006 > seeing there is a clean slate and an opportunity to get it > right from the get go ? You should subscribe to kde-multimedia@xxxxxxx and ask the question there. The short answer is: KDE doesn't need jack or portaudio or alsa. It needs a soundsystem or even better a sound-api which it can tell "play me file XYZ", "play video YQ with the sound going through that filter and with that volume". These are things that basic alsa/jack/portaudio can't do. The obvious answer would be xine/mplayer/gstreamer/arts. The experience with aRts tells use not to focus on one soundsystem and get lost if that is not maintained anymore. Thats why the kdemultimedia-devs (Matthias Kretz, Scoot Wheeler and some more) decided to create a layer between the running soundservers and the KDE-apps. This has the advantages that the normal KDE-dev doesn't care about what system is underneath. And that KDE can change the default soundserver (or even the distributions can change the default). Gstreamer will probably be the first choice for the default server but there are also tests with NAS, NMM, xine and some more going on... Please say good-bye to the thought of jack as the soundserver for everything. Jack is for professional raw datastreams with very little latency. For the typical desktop-app/game its irrelevant how much latency there is (if its not 2 secs) but it wants to play mp3 without thinking about encoding it... And yes, I am an official kde-mm-developer, I wrote KRec and do the translation of the gui and docs into german. And I suffered with aRts from the devels view... Arnold PS: For more info see http://vir.homelinux.org/talks/kdemm/lt2005/ -- Wenn man mit Raubkopien Bands wie Brosis oder Britney Spears wirklich verhindern k?nnte, w?rde ich mir noch heute einen Stapel Brenner und einen Sack Rohlinge kaufen.
