On Fri, Mar 21, 2008 at 8:15 PM, Albert Lee <trisk+opensolaris at acm.jhu.edu> wrote: > I might be missing something here, but I am unfamiliar with the view > that PulseAudio is meant to address ALSA's shortcomings. I remember the > project's primary goal as Polypaudio was to rewrite Esound (which has > always been flaky) and extend it with network transparency.
If you read comments by one of their authors, you might come to a somewhat different conclusion. > While old-school sound server tasks like mixing and sample rate > conversion are made obsolete by a modern sound architecture, PulseAudio > provides services outside of that realm, although its module system > might be considered to be conflicting with GStreamer. Indeed. > This is the first implementation of network-transparent audio that I've > seen gain critical mass (remember NAS?), and just for that I find it > very valuable. It has yet to gain critical mass. That might happen once Ubuntu adopts it, but still... I think the main point is that PulseAudio porivdes many bits of functionality that are not useful to Solaris users once OSS is integrated, or unless you need network audio. -- 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
