aRts needs to be replaced (was Re: Disabling aRts in knotify)

[Alexander Neundorf]

On Thursday 19 February 2004 17:55, Scott Wheeler wrote:
> On Thursday 19 February 2004 17:13, Guillaume Laurent wrote:
> > > So you want a mediaplayer that has no equalizer?
> >
> > A media player is not a soundserver.
> >
> > > You don't want to set
> > > different volumes for different apps?
> >
> > That's each app job, not the soundserver's.
> >
> > > Even if you don't need all of the above I can assure you that there are
> > > people out there that want/need features like that.
> >
> > None of them belongs in a sound server.
>
> Well, given a reasonable framework the programmer doesn't care what process
> this stuff is happening in.  The fact that aRts does this stuff in the
> sound server process is just an implementation detail.

I really don't think so. It's a design fault. We could also write a webbrowser 
which implements html, http, tcp, ip all itself (ok, slightly exaggerated ;-)
I heard way to many complaints about bad sound quality with arts if the system 
is busy and the buffers are too small. I don't want a sound daemon which 
blocks /dev/dsp, which eats cycles, which can crash and which makes the sound 
quality worse without adding *anything* for me. Then I simply won't even 
consider to develop a multimedia app with it. And I was in this position, and 
I decided not to do it.

> Of course we could debate the merits of aRts' design, but well, that would
> be mostly silly since I don't think anyone here is interested in the
> specifics.
>
> But the application programmer should be able to do something like "turn
> the volume down on this stream by 10%" or something without having to
> reimplement that over and over again.

Yes. And IMO it is very important that this doesn't depend on such a daemon, 
because it doesn't have to. It is also important that is nevertheless able to 
work with this kind of daemons, e.g. for network transparency.

> I don't care whether you chose to use a soundserver or not, and I'm not
> sure if that's what you're getting at, but there needs to be something
> available to multimedia programmers in KDE that handles these common media
> tasks (decoding, playing, buffering, etc.).

Yes.

Bye
Alex
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