Re: [osol-discuss] PulseAudio
Because the underlying audio APIs of Solaris (OSS and SunAudio) are not nearly as powerful as ALSA many of the niftier features I am currently working on will most likely not be available on Solaris anytime soon, though. Why don't you tell us about those ALSA features?. Just saying powerful ALSA APIs means nothing to us. You're going to also ensure that your powerful ALSA APIs support will be 100% backwards compatible with Redhat 5 or SuSE 10.1 right? Shawn's claim that OSS will give you better audio support than most GNU/Linux, is an adventurous claim, at best. Also, good audio support also requires good RT support, and afaik out-of-the-box Linux still tops Solaris by far on that. Why should ALSA even need your Pulse audio layer if it's so superior? Shouldn't dmix and dsnoop just work out of the box? You know it doesn't and hence the need for PA on linux. Regarding API stability: as with my other project Avahi I will not guarantee any API stability. [snip] changes coming up for a while. [b]So, in summary: if you still insist on a guarantee of API stability, than I fear PA is not for you. [/b]But those guarantees are mostly illusionary on Free Software projects anyway... A promise is as much as you can get. Any Solaris engineer will tell you that Stability-ness is next to Godliness. OSS guarantees backwards compatibility and API stability going back 10+ years. Remember mpg123 (from 1995) - it's still works unmodified on OSS v4.0. The fact you can't guarantee stability means your architecture isn't engineeredbut I will not blame you for that - that's your dependence on ALSA. PA is not made redundant by OSS. PA provides desktop integration, stuff like moving live streams between devices, network support and whatever. This is all stuff raw OSS cannot do. GStreamer will DO EVERYTHING pa will do and MORE. A direct OSS sink to Gstreamer is all that is needed for the desktop. Why do you need an extra layer of audio mixing?. Why didn't you join the Gstreamer project?. servo claims it is a bad design decision to do mixing and stuff in software. Quite frankly that claim is bogus. Modern sound cards don't even do hw mixing anymore. To find a soundcard which still does this agreed!. Additionally mixing in kernel mixing in userspace. You can ask why Microsoft is kicking itself for moving out the mixer to userspace and now have to throttle network throughput just to make audio skipless. Lennart Kind regrads Dev This message posted from opensolaris.org ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] PulseAudio
When OSS can support 8-channel, 32 precision, and 192k sampling rate, as well as other feathere, what is the specific niftier features that it is lack of compared with ALSA? A niftier acronym. (PS: Sarcasm.) -mg signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] PulseAudio
Hi! Yes, hello. Then, Unix Admin asked mumbled I don't mumble, and what I asked turned out to pertain to the paragraph I'm going to quote from you, below. I know why I asked what I asked, and I turned out to be correct: something about whether we might want to install Solaris on my machines. Thanks, but no thanks. I already got a good operating system, which is called Fedora, and its audio system is what I am payed to work on by Red Hat. Typical. Thanks for reinforcing the stereotype. Be that as it might, luckily for us Solaris users, you have a competition in the form of OSS. Now, OSS might not do what you claim, but to put it bluntly, it does support what end users need, which is sound. Or to put it even more bluntly: you don't want to run Solaris, well guess what? Shame, but luckily we don't need you either, since you're not the only game in town, and don't have the monopoly on providing audio capabilities. This message posted from opensolaris.org ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] PulseAudio
When OSS can support 8-channel, 32 precision, and 192k sampling rate, as well as other feathere, what is the specific niftier features that it is lack of compared with ALSA? Thank you Freeman Jon Trulson wrote: On Thu, 20 Dec 2007, Lennart Poettering wrote: Hi! Glynn asked me (as the upstream PulseAudio maintainer) to respond to this thread, so here I go. I'll try to respond to all the points raised in this thread: Richard Hamilton listed a couple of sound servers, claiming that it was a problem to adopt a sound server because there were so many of them. That's not really true. All sound servers he listed are either dead (MAS, ESD, aRts), prehistoric in its feature set (NAS, ESD) or not suitable for desktop use (Jack) or not a sound server at all Well I maintain NAS - have for about a decade now. No, it does not support 7.1 dolby-whatever, but it doesn't need to. It does what it claims to do, no more no less. [...] Then, Unix Admin asked mumbled something about whether we might want to install Solaris on my machines. Thanks, but no thanks. I already got a good operating system, which is called Fedora, and its audio system is what I am payed to work on by Red Hat. That must be nice :) I'd love to be paid to work on NAS. Provides alot of opportunity to improve/code things doesn't it? One of the reasons the other sound servers you mention (like MAS for example) aren't viable anymore is precisly because no one wanted to pay someone to work on it. You should consider yourself to be quite lucky - a paid engineer working on 'free' software. Cool. I want that gig :) Because the underlying audio APIs of Solaris (OSS and SunAudio) are not nearly as powerful as ALSA many of the niftier features I am currently working on will most likely not be available on Solaris anytime soon, though. Oh come on... I think you are thinking of the ancient OSS that linux ships (or used to ship with). I've seen the ALSA API. I'll pass, thanks. SunAdudio I'll agree with, but not OSS, sorry. Shawn Walker claimed that PA wasn't adopted yet. As mentioned above, we have been adopted by all relevant Linux distributions. There's not much left we could win in Free Software land, except maybe that little OS that starts with Slow and ends with aris. ;-) Oh, and a Ah... Again, you obviously haven't run a recent Solaris either (or ever??), have you. heh. couple of device manufacturers ship PA on mobile phones and GPS devices. And Nokia is now working on integrating it into Maemo What on earth for? too. So again, adoption is a non-issue. Besides maybe OpenSolaris, everyone who could adopt it has adopted it. I don't know what you mean by 'adopted'... I don't really see any need to 'adopt' a sound server at all, whether it be PA or NAS. If you need it, get it, else, who cares? [...] Shawn's claim that OSS will give you better audio support than most GNU/Linux, is an adventurous claim, at best. Also, good audio support also requires good RT support, and afaik out-of-the-box Linux still tops Solaris by far on that. Yes... I suppose that 'afaik' was a wise move... [...] PA is not made redundant by OSS. PA provides desktop integration, stuff like moving live streams between devices, network support and whatever. This is all stuff raw OSS cannot do. I'm sorry, but how many people really need to move audio streams between devices for 'desktop use'? Granted, it's a nice toy, but... Anyway, thanks for the condescending rant! :) [...] ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] PulseAudio
lennart wrote: Also, good audio support also requires good RT support, and afaik out-of-the-box Linux still tops Solaris by far on that. You obviously don't know much about Solaris realtime support, good thing you qualified that statement. As for the 'slowlaris' crack, that really shows how ignorant you are. Also that you don't do squat with HPC programming either, or know very much about high performance to speak of. Obviously you can do better than that. I would encourage you to avoid contempt without investigation in the future. Tim This message posted from opensolaris.org ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] PulseAudio
Never said it is bad, I just said that a software mixer doesn't need an intelligent sound device to operate. At all. In relation to this quote: -mg He mentioned that the feature set would be significantly reduced since OSS (when integrated) won't nearly provide as much capability as Alsa does on Linux, but confirmed it does work fine on Solaris already. signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] PulseAudio
Yay for CTRL-S... Shawn Walker claimed that PA wasn't adopted yet. As mentioned above, we have been adopted by all relevant Linux distributions. There's not much left we could win in Free Software land, except maybe that little OS that starts with Slow and ends with aris. ;-) a) Thanks for that witty shit joke. Always appreciate getting reminded why I don't like a lot of people from the Linux lands. BSD is dieing, too, if I remember it correctly, no? b) Various distros ship PA, boo-frickin-hoo. In most multimedia apps, PA support is treated like a redheaded stepchild, or non-existent (I don't consider gstreamer output plugins as support). The other big distros are only following, because Fedora, an important distro, integrates a bigger piece of software, which has mostly just been strong-armed into it by you. -mg signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] PulseAudio
On Thu, 20 Dec 2007, Lennart Poettering wrote: Hi! Glynn asked me (as the upstream PulseAudio maintainer) to respond to this thread, so here I go. I'll try to respond to all the points raised in this thread: Richard Hamilton listed a couple of sound servers, claiming that it was a problem to adopt a sound server because there were so many of them. That's not really true. All sound servers he listed are either dead (MAS, ESD, aRts), prehistoric in its feature set (NAS, ESD) or not suitable for desktop use (Jack) or not a sound server at all Well I maintain NAS - have for about a decade now. No, it does not support 7.1 dolby-whatever, but it doesn't need to. It does what it claims to do, no more no less. [...] Then, Unix Admin asked mumbled something about whether we might want to install Solaris on my machines. Thanks, but no thanks. I already got a good operating system, which is called Fedora, and its audio system is what I am payed to work on by Red Hat. That must be nice :) I'd love to be paid to work on NAS. Provides alot of opportunity to improve/code things doesn't it? One of the reasons the other sound servers you mention (like MAS for example) aren't viable anymore is precisly because no one wanted to pay someone to work on it. You should consider yourself to be quite lucky - a paid engineer working on 'free' software. Cool. I want that gig :) Because the underlying audio APIs of Solaris (OSS and SunAudio) are not nearly as powerful as ALSA many of the niftier features I am currently working on will most likely not be available on Solaris anytime soon, though. Oh come on... I think you are thinking of the ancient OSS that linux ships (or used to ship with). I've seen the ALSA API. I'll pass, thanks. SunAdudio I'll agree with, but not OSS, sorry. Shawn Walker claimed that PA wasn't adopted yet. As mentioned above, we have been adopted by all relevant Linux distributions. There's not much left we could win in Free Software land, except maybe that little OS that starts with Slow and ends with aris. ;-) Oh, and a Ah... Again, you obviously haven't run a recent Solaris either (or ever??), have you. heh. couple of device manufacturers ship PA on mobile phones and GPS devices. And Nokia is now working on integrating it into Maemo What on earth for? too. So again, adoption is a non-issue. Besides maybe OpenSolaris, everyone who could adopt it has adopted it. I don't know what you mean by 'adopted'... I don't really see any need to 'adopt' a sound server at all, whether it be PA or NAS. If you need it, get it, else, who cares? [...] Shawn's claim that OSS will give you better audio support than most GNU/Linux, is an adventurous claim, at best. Also, good audio support also requires good RT support, and afaik out-of-the-box Linux still tops Solaris by far on that. Yes... I suppose that 'afaik' was a wise move... [...] PA is not made redundant by OSS. PA provides desktop integration, stuff like moving live streams between devices, network support and whatever. This is all stuff raw OSS cannot do. I'm sorry, but how many people really need to move audio streams between devices for 'desktop use'? Granted, it's a nice toy, but... Anyway, thanks for the condescending rant! :) [...] -- Happy cheese in fear | Jon Trulson against oppressor, rebel!| mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Brocolli, hostage. -Unknown| #include std/disclaimer.h ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] PulseAudio
Hi! Glynn asked me (as the upstream PulseAudio maintainer) to respond to this thread, so here I go. I'll try to respond to all the points raised in this thread: Richard Hamilton listed a couple of sound servers, claiming that it was a problem to adopt a sound server because there were so many of them. That's not really true. All sound servers he listed are either dead (MAS, ESD, aRts), prehistoric in its feature set (NAS, ESD) or not suitable for desktop use (Jack) or not a sound server at all (Phonon, X11 audio extension). PA is the only sound server that is maintained, useful on the desktop and not a total mess of code. PA has been shipped of Fedora 8, it is thus not brand-new untested software, but a big part of the major issues and limitations have already been mitigated or fixed. All other relevant Linux distributions have now decided to ship and enable PA by default in their next stable releases, too. (OpenSUSE, Mandriva, Ubuntu). So, it's not that OpenSolaris would pioneer on this, all you need to do is follow the beaten paths. The major problems are already solved. Please note that PA is not a sound server for audio production, it is not competing with JACK (at least for now). It's a sound server focused on desktop use. Fixing the mess we have in audio on Linux/Unix right now is nothing we can fix by just snipping fingers, so there will always be a lot of areas we aren't touching. It is my intention to make PA the one true audio solution for Linux/Unix, but that'll take time. The biggest have been solved however, that's why it has gained adoption already. (Oh, and afaik noone uses Solaris for any serious audio production anyway (judging from how limited the SunAudio api is ;-)), so the pro audio argument probably doesn't really matter anyway) Then, Unix Admin asked mumbled something about whether we might want to install Solaris on my machines. Thanks, but no thanks. I already got a good operating system, which is called Fedora, and its audio system is what I am payed to work on by Red Hat. PA has been ported to Solaris by Pierre Ossman from Cendio. The port lags behind a few releases, but they're most likely going to update it early 2008 again. I personally only care for PA on Linux, however I am happy to merge all Solaris patches, if people send them to me. And hence: If OPenSolaris adopts PA, than someone from the Solaris camp has to stand up and take up maintainership of the Solaris port. Because the underlying audio APIs of Solaris (OSS and SunAudio) are not nearly as powerful as ALSA many of the niftier features I am currently working on will most likely not be available on Solaris anytime soon, though. Shawn Walker claimed that PA wasn't adopted yet. As mentioned above, we have been adopted by all relevant Linux distributions. There's not much left we could win in Free Software land, except maybe that little OS that starts with Slow and ends with aris. ;-) Oh, and a couple of device manufacturers ship PA on mobile phones and GPS devices. And Nokia is now working on integrating it into Maemo too. So again, adoption is a non-issue. Besides maybe OpenSolaris, everyone who could adopt it has adopted it. Shawn's claim that OSS will give you better audio support than most GNU/Linux, is an adventurous claim, at best. Also, good audio support also requires good RT support, and afaik out-of-the-box Linux still tops Solaris by far on that. Regarding API stability: as with my other project Avahi I will not guarantee any API stability. All I do is that I promise to try my best to keep the interfaces stable. Much the same as with Avahi. Now, with Avahi you guys chose to do this monstrous crack to port the Avahi D-Bus API to the Bonjour core. I already expressed in detail how much I dislike that disgusting mess you guys came up with, on my blog a while back (check Google if you wish, pleas don't flame me on this again, I happen to know the situation pretty well, so it's very unlikely you will convince me that I am wrong and you're right. I wrote Avahi, you didn't, there's not much to win by flaming me on this one). I hope you will not make the same error twice. Also, I didn't want to guarantee API stability for Avahi, but I did the same promise to try my best, and I kept it. To this date Avahi has been fully API stable since more than two years, and I see no changes coming up for the next year or two. And much the same is true for PA. The API has been stable for 18 months now, the protocol has been stable for longer than that. I see no incompatible changes coming up for a while. So, in summary: if you still insist on a guarantee of API stability, than I fear PA is not for you. But those guarantees are mostly illusionary on Free Software projects anyway... A promise is as much as you can get. PA is not made redundant by OSS. PA provides desktop integration, stuff like moving live streams between devices, network support and
Re: [osol-discuss] PulseAudio
On Dec 20, 2007 10:22 AM, Lennart Poettering [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi! Glynn asked me (as the upstream PulseAudio maintainer) to respond to this thread, so here I go. I'll try to respond to all the points raised in this thread: Richard Hamilton listed a couple of sound servers, claiming that it was a problem to adopt a sound server because there were so many of them. That's not really true. All sound servers he listed are either dead (MAS, ESD, aRts), prehistoric in its feature set (NAS, ESD) or not suitable for desktop use (Jack) or not a sound server at all (Phonon, X11 audio extension). PA is the only sound server that is maintained, useful on the desktop and not a total mess of code. PA has been shipped of Fedora 8, it is thus not brand-new untested software, but a big part of the major issues and limitations have already been mitigated or fixed. All other relevant Linux distributions have now decided to ship and enable PA by default in their next stable releases, too. (OpenSUSE, Mandriva, Ubuntu). So, it's not that OpenSolaris would pioneer on this, all you need to do is follow the beaten paths. The major problems are already solved. Yes, and all of them had grand plans at one time too, and now, as you point out, they're dead. Because the underlying audio APIs of Solaris (OSS and SunAudio) are not nearly as powerful as ALSA many of the niftier features I am currently working on will most likely not be available on Solaris anytime soon, though. Claims that it is not as powerful without specific examples are not helpful. My personal experience with ALSA as a developer has always been less then pleasant. I have always preferred OSS, even on GNU/Linux systems. Shawn Walker claimed that PA wasn't adopted yet. As mentioned above, we have been adopted by all relevant Linux distributions. There's not much left we could win in Free Software land, except maybe that little OS that starts with Slow and ends with aris. ;-) Oh, and a couple of device manufacturers ship PA on mobile phones and GPS devices. And Nokia is now working on integrating it into Maemo too. So again, adoption is a non-issue. Besides maybe OpenSolaris, everyone who could adopt it has adopted it. It isn't adopted yet; at least not by any platform but GNOME, and only by some distributions. Notably, KDE3 and KDE4 both currently lack official backends for it. That means at best, it has only recently been adopted by GNOME-based distributions. KDE users still have the current issues. Trolltech does not officially have a pulseaudio backend for Phonon. Shawn's claim that OSS will give you better audio support than most GNU/Linux, is an adventurous claim, at best. Also, good audio support also requires good RT support, and afaik out-of-the-box Linux still tops Solaris by far on that. How so? Are you aware the OSS provides full 5.1, 7.1, software mixing, etc.? Are you aware that it actually supports many devices that ALSA does not? PA is not made redundant by OSS. PA provides desktop integration, stuff like moving live streams between devices, network support and whatever. This is all stuff raw OSS cannot do. Which users may or may not need. I don't have any need of those features. desktop integration is too vague for me to comment on. servo claims it is a bad design decision to do mixing and stuff in software. Quite frankly that claim is bogus. Modern sound cards don't even do hw mixing anymore. To find a soundcard which still does this you have to find one that has been manufactured more than 5 years ago or so. Mixing audio is not exactly the most CPU intensive code in existance. After all SSE and MMX primary purpose is to speed up things like this. Also, that legacy hw that still does hw mixing only provides a limited number of concurrent streams, so if you want to mix more you have to fall back to sw mixing anyway. You remember the time when every sound card came with wavetable logic? It's the same with hw mixing, that time is ended, over, finito. And it is good that way. Modern sound cards (like those following Intel's HDA) are usually not much more than good DACs, and sometimes don't even do hw volume control but instead rely on software for that. Sorry, but that's just wrong. Modern sound cards *do* still have hardware mixing. Every Creative Labs card still supports hardware mixing, as does almost every single add-in hardware device. While it is true that many on-board sound chipsets may not support hardware mixing, it is not true that modern sound cards don't even do hw mixing anymore. Sound cards still being made that do hardware mixing and gamers are more likely to have them. Quite frankly, I don't feel PulseAudio has justified it's functionality enough. While I will be the first to agree that it is certainly more promising in some regards than past approaches, some of your claims are not sufficiently justified. -- Shawn Walker,
Re: [osol-discuss] PulseAudio
On Dec 20, 2007 6:22 PM, Lennart Poettering [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi! Glynn asked me (as the upstream PulseAudio maintainer) to respond to this thread, so here I go. I'll try to respond to all the points raised in this thread: Richard Hamilton listed a couple of sound servers, claiming that it was a problem to adopt a sound server because there were so many of them. That's not really true. All sound servers he listed are either dead (MAS, ESD, aRts), prehistoric in its feature set (NAS, ESD) or not suitable for desktop use (Jack) or not a sound server at all (Phonon, X11 audio extension). PA is the only sound server that is maintained, useful on the desktop and not a total mess of code. PA has been shipped of Fedora 8, it is thus not brand-new untested software, but a big part of the major issues and limitations have already been mitigated or I cannot say for all the Fedora 8 instances out there, but on my F8 office machine the audio plain didn't work until I removed PA. After that I could enjoy my multimedia again... ... except maybe that little OS that starts with Slow and ends with aris. ;-) Grow up, man, grow up... -- Regards, Cyril ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] PulseAudio
Here's a list of features I pulled off Pulse Audio's website: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PulseAudio The main PulseAudio features include: * Per-application volume controls [1] OSS already does that. * An extensible plugin architecture with support for loadable modules. If you look at http://pulseaudio.org/wiki/Modules - they are talking about Pulse audio functionality being implemented as modules - similar to GStreamer. OSS is multiplatform and already has a lot of features that they talk about. * Compatibility with many popular audio applications. OSS is 100% in coverage. Pulse talks about many popular apps. * Support for multiple audio sources and sinks. OSS has virtual mixer and input multiplexer built in. * Low-latency operation and support for latency measurement. Can't get lower than the driver in kernel. * A zero-copy memory architecture for processor resource efficiency. No copy needed for OSS apps. You write your buffers directly to the driver. * A command-line interface with scripting capabilities. OSS also has command line apps and also provide PhP/Perl scripting and support in Java. * A sound daemon with command line reconfiguration capabilities. Pulse is a replacement for ESD and nothing more. With OSS v4 you don't need a mixing daemon because OSS gives you virtual devices for mixing directly. Pulse has network features but I really don't know who would use it. Network audio is now redefined to be VOIP. Pulse audio doesn't support any kind of X Windows protocol or VoiceXML or VoiceHTML so really I don't know what the benefits of their network architecture are. * Built-in sample conversion and resampling capabilities. OSS has superior Sample Rate convertors...infact you can control the quality (high quality vs fast processing) * The ability to combine multiple sound cards into one. This usually never works because each card's crystal freqs and latencies will prevent the application from outputting audio in a phase lock...which means after a while output from one sound card will drift. * The ability to synchronize multiple playback streams. OSS does this as well.we have a Remux driver that allows you to take 4 output streams and create a 5.1 surround stream. 4Front is going to make GStreamer talk directly to OSS and we've already contracted the Gstreamer developers to do this work. Part of the deliverables will be 1) a Gstreamer configuration panel to configure audio devices 2) a Gnome volume panel that exposes all OSS mixer elements - hopefully it will look nicer than ossxmix that comes with OSS. 3) Direct interaction between GStreamer and OSS drivers and no need for any intermediate mixing daemons like Pulse audio or ESD or whatever else. 4) Support for 7.1 multichannel and rates upto 192Khz, 24bit. However there is no problem in having Pulse Audio sit on top of OSS if there is some Pulse Audio app that isn't supporting OSS (I can't imagine there being any such app). Look at the mixing technology within Pulse Audio and then compare it to what we've done in Open Sound: http://manuals.opensound.com/sources/grc3.c.html regards Dev This message posted from opensolaris.org ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] PulseAudio
For the record, Solaris is listed as a supported platform: http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/AboutPulseAudio Which is a huge joke, because it uses the wrong type of ioctl structs (those with the additional fields that Solaris doesn't support) and doesn't even wrap them in #ifdefs. To compile PulseAudio, you need to change quite a few other things too, besides what SFE patches. -mg ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] PulseAudio
I talked to Lennart during the week, and he's keen to see PulseAudio in Solaris as well. He mentioned that the feature set would be significantly reduced since OSS (when integrated) won't nearly provide as much capability as Alsa does on Linux, but confirmed it does work fine on Solaris already. I'm sorry if I look like a Negative Nancy, but that's a load of crap based on his hate against OSS. One of the points of a pure software mixer (which is what PulseAudio is) is that all processing, mixing, effects, channel assignments and whatever else is controlled by and lies on the software side and doesn't require more than a bunch of dumb output channels without even proper volume control. I don't really see the point of an audio server, if the native audio interface very well supports software mixing itself. Maybe not as sophisticated as PulseAudio, but that type of sophistication is more sugar coating than practical. -mg ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] PulseAudio
I have a question... Is there any plan to integrate PulseAudio as the sound server in Solaris? I have been searching around forums and mailing lists and still didn't find anything about this... but it's becoming kind of the standard in the big linux distros (and GNOME) and it might be useful for solaris as well.. from the webpage ( http://www.pulseaudio.org/ ) : PulseAudio is a sound server for POSIX and Win32 systems. A sound server is basically a proxy for your sound applications. It allows you to do advanced operations on your sound data as it passes between your application and your hardware. Things like transferring the audio to a different machine, changing the sample format or channel count and mixing several sounds into one are easily achieved using a sound server. and here are some of the announcements or projects of pulseaudio in the distros: Fedora: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeaturePulseaud io Ubuntu: https://launchpad.net/pulseaudio openSUSE: http://dev.compiz-fusion.org/~cyberorg/2007/11/22/puls eaudio-compiz-for-sound-on-opensuse/ Mandriva: http://www.happyassassin.net/2007/12/05/pulseaudio-for -20081/ The problem with network based audio servers is that there are so many to choose from, and a number of them don't seem to have survived the test of time: * MAS http://www.mediaapplicationserver.net/indexframes.html apparently inactive; at one time, claimed to be part of the path to eventual audio integration into X-Windows itself * NAS http://www.radscan.com/nas.html active * ESD ??? active (sort of) * Phonon http://phonon.kde.org/ active * aRts http://www.arts-project.org/ inactive * JACK http://jackaudio.org/ plus NetJack http://netjack.sourceforge.net/ active and somewhat different, * X11 Audio Extension http://www.chaoticmind.net/~hcb/murx/xaudio/ (relatively new?) (I probably left out some, too...) To make it available on a very uncommitted (downright experimental) basis, in case there are app that work best (or only) with it, might _maybe_ not be a bad idea. But I think things are probably a long way from consensus, and I _know_ I'm not qualified to make an architectual evaluation of the various alternatives. All I know is that I want as many audio (including MIDI), multimedia, and related apps to work on Solaris as possible, without waiting for consensus to be reached as to the One True Audio Solution; while at the same time hoping that consensus, effort, and application support will eventually coalesce around the alternative with the greatest potential. But on that last point, I'm not very optimistic, remembering VHS vs Beta, or looking at the current Blu-Ray vs HD DVD. This message posted from opensolaris.org ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] PulseAudio
I have a question... Is there any plan to integrate PulseAudio as the sound server in Solaris? I have been searching around forums and mailing lists and still didn't find anything about this... but it's becoming kind of the standard in the big linux distros (and GNOME) and it might be useful for solaris as well.. Why isn't the serum working? Perhaps we are asking the wrong questions. Likewise, perhaps you are asking at a wrong place. I suggest to contact the developers of PulseAudio to ask them if they have any plans on porting this software to Solaris. Perhaps you might be able to convince them that Solaris is gratis and runs really well and fast on their PCs, and that there is no reason for them to really say we don't have Solaris to test on. This message posted from opensolaris.org ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] PulseAudio
On Dec 10, 2007 5:55 PM, UNIX admin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Likewise, perhaps you are asking at a wrong place. I suggest to contact the developers of PulseAudio to ask them if they have any plans on porting this software to Solaris. Perhaps you might be able to convince them that Solaris is gratis and runs really well and fast on their PCs, and that there is no reason for them to really say we don't have Solaris to test on. From PulseAudio home page ( http://pulseaudio.org ) PulseAudio has been tested on Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, Windows 2000 and Windows XP. -- Regards, Cyril ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] PulseAudio
On Dec 10, 2007 3:55 PM, UNIX admin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I have a question... Is there any plan to integrate PulseAudio as the sound server in Solaris? I suggest to contact the developers of PulseAudio to ask them if they have any plans on porting this software to Solaris. That's not the same as integrating it. -- Rasputnik :: Jack of All Trades - Master of Nuns http://number9.hellooperator.net/ ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] PulseAudio
On Dec 10, 2007 10:26 AM, Dick Davies [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Dec 10, 2007 3:55 PM, UNIX admin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I have a question... Is there any plan to integrate PulseAudio as the sound server in Solaris? I suggest to contact the developers of PulseAudio to ask them if they have any plans on porting this software to Solaris. That's not the same as integrating it. Until it has adoption and stability I'm not sure it's worth spending the work integrating. Part of the reason so many GNU/Linux distributions use Audio Servers is because most of their sound drivers lack support for multiple applications to output audio at the same time. Once we get OSS integrated, not only will we have better sound support than most GNU/Linux, but one of the reasons they use sound servers won't apply to us. Unlike the GNU/Linux world, integration tends to imply a certain level of support and commitment in our world. In relation to that, I am unable to find any documentation regarding their commitment to interface stability, etc. PulseAudio also seems redundant in the face of OSS which provides many of the same pieces of functionality. About the only advantage I can see to having it available is its possible adoption by future project and its network audio support. Finally, I have serious concerns about its affects on audio performance after reading the FAQ where it talks about audio buffer fragmentation, changing the server to real-time priority scheduling to alleviate audio issues, etc. I would rather see OSS enhanced for the per-application functionality that it adds and use that without adding another layer of indirection on top of the ridiculous amount we already have today for some applications for audio. For the record, Solaris is listed as a supported platform: http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/AboutPulseAudio -- Shawn Walker, Software and Systems Analyst http://binarycrusader.blogspot.com/ To err is human -- and to blame it on a computer is even more so. - Robert Orben ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] PulseAudio
Victor wrote: I have a question... Is there any plan to integrate PulseAudio as the sound server in Solaris? I have been searching around forums and mailing lists and still didn't find anything about this... but it's becoming kind of the standard in the big linux distros (and GNOME) and it might be useful for solaris as well.. I talked to Lennart during the week, and he's keen to see PulseAudio in Solaris as well. He mentioned that the feature set would be significantly reduced since OSS (when integrated) won't nearly provide as much capability as Alsa does on Linux, but confirmed it does work fine on Solaris already. Glynn ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] PulseAudio
He mentioned that the feature set would be significantly reduced since OSS (when integrated) won't nearly provide as much capability as Alsa does on Linux, but confirmed it does work fine on Solaris already. what capabilities from alsa are missing in oss? nacho ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
