Now that I've gotten a pretty clear picture of the concensus about
PulseAudio, I wondered about some of the other (new and old) sound
facilities in Linux, and specifically wondered if being on a system like
Gentoo where one can turn off build-time support for these things is a
good idea. So...
PortAudio:
>From what I can see, this doesn't do much. It seems to provide an API
of sorts that unifies Linux sound with sound on other operating systems.
(For example, FreeBSD supports PortAudio, even though its an OSS-based
system.) Then again, I thought Alsa's OSS emulation provided a
'/dev/dsp' that did that already. Anyway...
Is this bad? Has anyone had nearly the nightmares with
PortAudio presence in a DAW system that's described from users of newer
systems with PulseAudio? I don't want to incriminate it just because
its name is similar. (Though I do find myself calling PortAudio
"PulseAudio" by accident a lot. They really could have found a better
name for that...)
Gentoo has a USE flag to disable PortAudio, but I hesitate to do
so if most of the apps these days are taking its presence as a given. I
don't want to diverge from what's perceived as "normal" upstream more
than necessary to achieve good results.
Esound ("esd"):
This is truly 90's technology that won't die, and we all know that.
The question is, how much of an assumption is it in the apps (and in the
Gnome desktop) to the extent that if it weren't there, there would be
problems? Is it safe on a Gentoo system to globally ban build support
for ESD? Sure, Alsa has its own mixer, but will the apps just
transparently use it if ESD isn't around? This is really the gist of
all my questions here: We know there are daemons we don't like. But
which ones are safe to actually kill, and which ones do we still sadly
depend on for something or other?
Arts ("artsd"):
I already have some doubts about eliminating this one, at least in any
system that hopes to have a KDE desktop available. Even if we don't
need it per se, KDE seems (at least to a naive user like me) to be
deeply wedded to it. There are even direct mentions of artsd setup in
some of the audio setup panels of the KDE Control Panel. Does banning
Artsd support equal losing all desktop audio support in KDE? It looks
like it might...experiences?
I guess what I'm thinking is that it'd be nice to do a build in which
everything but Alsa and Jack is banished to hell, but I'm wondering if
that will leave some programs at a loss to find a mixer at all, and thus
without sound. Ideally, all sound apps, regardless of what target
they're expecting, ought to be able to transparently find the Alsa
mixer, and multiplex with other apps to share access with it
simultaneously, also without special setup.
Does that work?
(I'd even put up with artsd if I had to, since KDE seems to assume it,
and since it doesn't seem to cause major problems...)
--
+ Brent A. Busby + "We've all heard that a million monkeys
+ UNIX Systems Admin + banging on a million typewriters will
+ University of Chicago + eventually reproduce the entire works of
+ Physical Sciences Div. + Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet,
+ James Franck Institute + we know this is not true." -Robert Wilensky
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