Since you're looking into different alternatives, have you considered PortAudio (www.portaudio.com)? The ALSA implementation of v19 (development branch) is well developed, and fairly stable from what I can see (being one of the developers). There hasn't been a lot of feedback, but my own testing hasn't turned up any bugs in a while. PortAudio also offers two different interfaces to the programmer, both blocking and callback interfaces are completed for the ALSA implementation. So you can choose whichever suits your application the best. At the same time, should you wish to write cross-platform programs, PortAudio supports different platforms. I don't know the current state of all the implementations, but Windows MME and ASIO should be well functional and SGI IRIX seems to be coming along.
Hope this helps
Arve Knudsen
On Fri, 02 Jan 2004 18:15:12 +0000, Nick Ing-Simmons <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I have two Audio related projects that need updating.
1. "rsynth" formant based text-to-speech synthesis
2. Audio::* Perl modules.
Both have existing /dev/dsp style backends at present, which have been working
fine. But recently (SuSE 9.0 install?) when run under ALSA emulation of
/dev/dsp they both started producing segfaults - "after program had exited",
(neither valgrind nor gdb can give any info on the fault).
So I decided it was time to do a native ALSA backend(s). I have rsynth backend working, and perl Audio:: one almost working. But before going forward I would like to solicit opinions on what is the "right" API to use.
The Linux audio world seems to be in a state of flux with these options (please tell me if I missed any):
1. Venerable OSS stuff - Widely available :-) - Some cards have quasi or truely commecial drivers rather than free / opensource ones :-( - emulation via ALSA (at least as shipped by SuSE) seems broken :-(
2. ALSA
- Reasonably widely available :-|, and improving
- Opensource :-)
- Documentation is lacking :-(
Everything hinges on the
"Configuration Space" concept, but I can't find an explanation of
how that works. This is the sticking point with perl code - I can't find
how to change the sample rate / channels, so _seems_ I need to
close and re-open.
3. JACK - Gets lots of excited "this is cool" kind of coverage :-) - realtime :-) - Callback style not ideal for speech synthesis or play-from-file of my simple apps. complex :-(
4. Enlightenment Sound Demon - Seems to be used by KDE etc. - haven't looked into it further.
5. Network Audio System - Works on many platforms Linux/Solaris/X Terminals :-) - X-like "imake" style rather than configure :-( - Linux version still seems to be based on OSS - so recurse ;-)
6. Presumably there is some kind of telephony API as well, for sending sound to incomming phone calls via modem / ISDN
Complexity and callbacks don't scare me - I do perl/Tk after all! But this is a 2nd-string project so I don't want to do a lot of complex stuff for an API that is vanishing - I would rather either use a simple stable interface, or pitch in and help on the "comming" complex API.
Suggestions anyone? (I just subscribed to both lists - so reply to your favourite list.)
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