aRts in trunk

[Mark Constable]

On Saturday 30 July 2005 04:41, Allan Sandfeld Jensen wrote:
> > We need a kjackd... which could be a tweaked qjackctl.
> > Jack can sit on top of Portaudio for non-linux KDE systems.
> >
> Jack sucks pretty badly as a desktop audio backend.

It would offer KDE users the widest choice of connecting just
about any sort of casual or professional audio app avaiable.

> Low latency means it is much more prone to drop-outs,

ANY decent audio system prefers lower latencies. I'm not sure
what you meant by this... dropouts a more likely to happen with
any system at higher latencies.

> and configuring and installing it is a pain. 

Exactly, if it's a part of KDE it would get so much more exposure
and focus that the setup difficulties would dealt with. That's what
using KDE is all about, hiding the ugly stuff from users.

> My current suggestion is to leave sound mixing the OSS layer in FreeBSD and 
> ALSA dmix for Linux, and just use a direct audio backend like gstreamer or 
> akode.

None of those options will allow me to work with Rosegarden,
ardour and JAMin, and the myriad of other quality linux audio
tools... they depend on Jack to work in unison and if KDE could
hide all the Jack setup and management uglies by default then
we'd have a system, out of the box, that would be acceptable
in higher end a/v studio environments.

Even non-professional but serious KDE users will want to use 
video and podcasting software and that all depends of audio...
and the more flexible the lower sound system the easier it will
be to allow any a/v editing app(s) to work together in the future.

--markc