aRts vs JACK

[Stefan Westerfeld]

   Hi!

On Mon, Feb 24, 2003 at 10:34:27AM +0100, Jozef Kosoru wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 22, 2003 at 11:09:24PM +0100, Stefan Westerfeld wrote:
> > > Is CSL going to be the real future?
> > 
> > Write a CSL driver for JACK, if you ask me. Thats what I recommend w.r.t. MAS
> > as well.
> 
> Well, I've looked a bit at the ALSA JACK pcm_plugin and it seems to be the
> brilliant solution for the 'aRts vs JACK' problem. It allows
> non-realtime clients to use JACK as a backend. This is far better and
> more complex solution than JACK output plugin for aRts or CLS layer,
> because it covers OSS apps and ALSA apps as well.

I am not entierly convinced of this, because this doesn't solve the
interoperability problem for systems that ALSA doesn't run under. The very
idea of CSL is to get rid of the sound portability problem once and for all
on all (unixoid) platforms.

Thus, if CSL supports aRts and JACK, and for instance xmms supports CSL, then
xmms will be able to use whatever is appropriate on all platforms that KDE is
running on.

The same is valid for MAS, JACK, aRts, GStreamer or any other "meta-
application". As long as we add CSL support to each of them, then all of
these will interoperate in any combination with eachother, transparent to the
user.

Of course you may argue that porting and deploying ALSA on all platforms will
do the same. However, I think that while "not supporting anything but CSL"
could be made a feasible option for most sound applications within the next
months, "not supporting anything but ALSA" is far from this.

   Cu... Stefan
-- 
  -* Stefan Westerfeld, stefan at space.twc.de (PGP!), Hamburg/Germany
     KDE Developer, project infos at http://space.twc.de/~stefan/kde *-