[linux-audio-dev] Fwd: CSL Motivation

[Stefan Westerfeld]

   Hi!

On Thu, Feb 27, 2003 at 06:55:08PM +0200, Kai Vehmanen wrote:
> What I'm personally most impressed and proud about is that we've been able
> to get developers from different (some directly competing) projects to
> work together on this. Although linux-audio-dev is an active communicty,
> actual code-level sharing so far has not been common.

Yes ; actually, although a lot of free software audio developers want to make
proprietary software go away, we until now have had an "non perfect way of
doing it", in the sense that diversity was there, but not interoperability
between the pieces that had been done. While JACK handles one aspect of the
problem, I would be really glad if CSL could cover another one.

> > If you added CSL support to JACK right now, you would never need to bother
> > with any of the "sound server guys" like me again, because you could always
> > say: "support CSL in your sound server thing, and then JACK will support your
> > sound server".
> 
> Yup, I guess it wouldn't be too big of a task to adapt (for instance) the 
> ALSA's JACK PCM-plugin for the CSL API. Hopefully someone will do this.

Yes, that would be great.

> Do you have any code in place that handles the backend detection for CSL?

Until now, we just have static priorities and a fallback mechanism. That is,
CSL right now uses aRts if it is there, and OSS if not. If you add a JACK
backend, we could do JACK if present, if not aRts if present, if not OSS.

But I think this should really be changed to something where the user can
select between all devices. We also need dynamically loadable drivers. I have
put libtool into the CVS for a basic portable dynamically loadable drivers
thing, but the loading needs to be implemented. I hope to be able to add that
soon. There probably will be more and more backends in the future.

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