Testing Request for KDE+PulseAudio users

[Michael Pujos]

Colin Guthrie a écrit :
> More and more audio device *are* network based. Apple Airport Express 
> devices are pretty popular these days. I have two bluetooth headsets and 
> my hifi system also support bluetooth connections. My Playstation 3 
> supports uPNP media renderers. So lots of things relating to network 
> Audio are popping up (which is nothing to do with pulse->pulse network 
> connections which is arguably a toy, even if I do personally use it a 
> lot!). I don't think these should be ignored. PulseAudio supports all of 
> these devices right now (although I've not had time to try the uPNP 
> stuff on my PS3 specifically so don't quote me on that!)
>
>   

IMHO, PulseAudio or Phonon should stay away from both UPnP Media 
Renderers and Airport Express, as sending audio
to those devices has nothing to do with setting up  a local sound card, 
and more to do with  http streaming and SOAP requests.
Also PS3 is not a Media Renderer (you cannot push content to it), it is 
just a Media Player.

One of the biggest problems of audio on Linux is the overload of layers 
upon layers upon layers and abstractions abstracting other abstractions 
with all the potential bugs that implies.
Some guy mapped the dependency graph of all those layers and the result 
was just insane.
The result is that when a user has an audio problem and reports it 
(often in a not very helpful form) everyone will blame the layer he's 
not working on ("not my problem") and bug remains. This
is proably a bit caricatural but you get the point...
An audio player should go to great length to make audio work reliably 
and IMHO the best way to do it is to code to the standard platform audio 
API: alsa on Linux, DirectSound on Windows, etc.