[KDE/Mac] kmix on OSX sensible or not?

[Ian Wadham]

Hi Marko,

On 20/03/2015, at 5:26 PM, Marko Käning wrote:
> I had an exchange with Christian Esken about kmix and wondered whether
> you could give me a hint as to whether it makes sense to actually try
> to build kmix on OSX or whether it’s wasted energy just. :-)
>>> Thanks for the explanations and hints on build system and code. I will check
>>> this with Ian Wadham, I think, since he knows more about sound on Linux.

That reputation is entirely undeserved… :-)  In fact, in consideration for other
members of the household, I have almost always worked with sound turned
off… :-)  But now that I was given some Bose Bluetooth headphones last
Christmas, I have been known to enjoy the odd symphony or concerto… :-)

Sound was always rather a mess in Linux FWICR.  Phonon (new with KDE 4)
was supposed to make it all much easier for KDE developers, but never did
work well with the short sharp precisely-timed sounds you need in games
programming.  Most games have now ended up using the OpenAL library.

I only ever used KMix as an overall volume control (on a KDE desktop) and
never did see much use for all the other sliders it has.  Perhaps if they had
been better documented back then… ?

On my MacBook there are nicely-labelled function-keys to do what I used to
do with KMix, so why would I want to use KMix now?  And the main media
apps have volume sliders and the headphones have +/- buttons too… :-)

Cheers, Ian W.