Ken: > 1. Firewire 400/800 support
This, I think, will require work from the HAL team. > 2. MIDI support At the moment, I think the only MIDI support in Solaris is with Java Media Player, which can be used for playing MIDI files. There is MIDI support in OSS, though I think the OSS team has already decided that this won't be included in the first integration of OSS into Solaris. I think their hands are really full just getting everything else done. I think their long term plan is to get the MIDI support into Solaris eventually, though I don't know their timeframe. So, it might be some time before MIDI support is significantly improved on Solaris. I'd be interested to hear if there are any people out there who have any novel MIDI solutions working on Solaris. > 3. Mixer support There are plans to revamp gnome-volume-control mixer by the OSS team. This should be done in conjunction to when OSS goes into Solaris. If you are talking about a multi-channel mixing program, such as jokosher or audacity, then I think it would be great if Solaris had more to offer in this area. Both jokosher and audacity are in spec-files-extra so you can try them out on Solaris. However, I think both programs have runtime issues on Solaris. There will likely be more opportunities in this space once OSS is fully integrated in Solaris, since many more professional UNIX audio tools work with OSS rather than SunAudio interfaces. > 4. Rosegarden 1.5.1 and Ardour 2.1 integration Since ardour currently depends on JACK, I'm not sure how well it would work on Solaris. There are currently spec-files for JACK in spec-files-extra, but I'm not sure how well they work, and I am also not sure how well the JACK MIDI interfaces work on Solaris. It might be necessary to port ardour to use OSS to get it working on Solaris. Though, this might need to wait until MIDI is supported in OSS on Solaris, at least for full MIDI support. Rosegarden does look interesting. I'm not sure what dependencies it has. If it works with OSS, then getting it to work on Solaris might not be too much work. Personally, I'm not sure to what degree Sun will consider integrating professional audio applications into Solaris, or if such programs will just live in spec-files-extra. For the time being, I think they will live in spec-files-extra, but we should discuss further. Especially if a good candidate comes up that works well on Solaris and isn't too difficult to integrate. It would be easier to consider integrating such programs if there were enough of a Solaris community to work out the issues and bugs that exist with using these sorts of tools on Solaris. So I recommend that interested people get involved with such projects! Another issue is that many professional audio programs seem to depend on a lot of interfaces that aren't in Solaris. For example, audacity depends on wxwidgets. It makes it easier to consider integrating programs into Solaris when they don't also drag in a lot of other things that might be hard to maintain long term. > 5. Gstreamer 0.10.14, ALSA 1.0.15, Open Sound System v4.0 b1008 review We already have GStreamer 0.10.14 in Solaris. OSS is planned to integrate into Solaris sometime early next year, though without MIDI support in the initial release. I don't think there are any plans to really support ALSA on Solaris, though there is a spec-files in spec-files-extra for those who want to try to use programs that depend on it. Not sure how well it works. > If we could have a good discussion about each of those areas, we might make > major headway by Xmas! I suspect it will take longer than this, since OSS integration is probably a necessary step in the evolution of media on Solaris, and this will not happen until early next year. But it's still worth discussing! Brian
