[linux-audio-dev] Fwd: CSL Motivation (fwd)

[Joshua Haberman]

On Tue, 2003-03-04 at 05:12, Thomas Vander Stichele wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> > The only disadvantage I see in the above scheme is that there is some
> > duplication of code between PortAudio and gstreamer.  But this seems
> > irreconcilable; GStreamer isn't useful for Multimedia-editing
> > applications (unless they were built from the ground up to use it), and
> > I doubt GStreamer will ever use PortAudio for audio output.
> 
> Is there a technical reason why GStreamer couldn't use PortAudio for audio 
> output ?

I think it would definitely be possible to write a PortAudio sink for
GStreamer; the question would be how well the two models fit together. 
PortAudio v19 (still in development) offers both a blocking and a
callback interface: if you use the blocking interface you will get
lower-level control with APIs that support blocking calls (OSS, ALSA)
but callback-native APIs like JACK will not work.  If you use the
callback interface, the OSS and ALSA implementations will automatically
spawn a thread that you have no control over, but JACK will work since
it uses callbacks natively.

Josh