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

[René J.V. Bertin]

On Friday March 20 2015 18:47:31 Ian Wadham wrote:
>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. :-)

Hi,

I'd say it'll be wasted energy, or a nice project for someone who'd want to learn the CoreAudio API.

I know KMix as something that's somehow/sometimes accessible from my Linux systray, but like Ian I rarely use it. In my case that's because if I do audio output from my Linux rigs, it's over HDMI to a good AV amplifier, so the computer's volume should be at 100% (= send the raw/bit-perfect signal to the amp).

On OS X we have Audio Midi Setup and the Sound thingy in System Preferences, and I just don't see what KMix can provide that those cannot. Not until we have better control over the sound playback device in KDE applications: as long as all sound output goes to the default CoreAudio device (comparable to "pulse" on Linux, which means "use the PulseAudio daemon and however that one is configured") it doesn't make sense to provide a mixer application IMHO.

As to the situation on Linux: I think that the "issues" with phonon stem from the fact that most distributions configure PulseAudio as the default interface to ALSA, which in turn is probably because GTk/Gnome applications cannot use Phonon. If you tell Phonon not to use PulseAudio and install the VLC Phonon backend you get much better control and probably more direct access to the hardware (= less delays).

Cheers,
R.