Disabling aRts in knotify

[Scott Wheeler]

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On Wednesday 18 February 2004 20:25, Alexander Neundorf wrote:

> Well, IOW I don't need it, many other people don't need it, it adds a daemon 
> which can crash while simply playing audio, it needs cpu power, it doesn't 
> improve the sound quality, it doesn't add anything for me.

It's the same with any toolkit -- it makes it easier on developers and users.  
I mean, why not write everything in raw xlib?  Or directly to the frame 
buffer?  That's essentially the video equivalent.

Handling all of this in a neat abstraction makes it easier on developers and 
ideally means that users get a more unified set of applications.
 
> I mean almost everything in KDE is plugin-based, I think it must be possible 
> to make the kde sound backend plugin-based too. One plugin for arts, one for 
> OSS, one for ALSA, one for gstreamer, one for MAS, .... 

Well, all of those systems are vastly different and provide very different 
capabilities.  The first mistake here is that KDE multimedia applications 
don't work with audio or decoding directly, nor should they.  You can't just 
send an mp3 to /dev/dsp and have sound come out.  You have to decode it, 
handle buffering and and scheduling issues, possibly deal with synchronized 
video.  It's just not as trivial as everyone would like to make it.

So, there are two options -- you duplicate a lot of non-trivial code in every 
application that needs those capabilities or you start putting that somewhere 
common where it can be used by all of the applications that need those 
capabilities.  In the second case you've just started work on yet another 
media framework.

> Basically these plugins would simply forward sampled raw audio data to the 
> backend. Almost no cpu usage, much few chances to crash, etc.

Again, none of the multimedia apps in KDE deal with raw audio.  I know that 
solution sounds attractive and all that, but it's just not a simple problem 
and there's no silver bullet for fixing it.  From a software developers point 
of view getting behind the frameworks and helping them get to the point of 
not sucking is the way to go.

- -Scott

- -- 
New Orleans food is as delicious as the less criminal forms of sin.
 --Mark Twain
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