Hi Brian,
There are two basic APIs: OSS and ALSA. Both audio systems can handle mixing of audio - OSS and ALSA both have their advantages and disadvantages. PulseAudio is nothing more than ESD on Steroids. ESD was written as a sound mixer for the old OSS drivers since only a few devices supported hardware mixing. But before Pulse audio, came GStreamer and artsd - audio frameworks for Gnome and KDE respectively. Each of these media frameworks had the ability to talk directly to the underlying audio API: OSS or ALSA or whatever else you could port them to. Pulse audio guys have worked themselves into a position claiming cross platform compatiblity because OSS until last June was still closed source. Now that we've opened it up and licensed it under GPL/CDDL/BSD - there is no reason not to use the built in mixing engine and do away with any additional layers. regards Dev -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
