KDE Sound and Multimedia Plan

[Stefan Majewsky]

Hi,

[FYI I'm not subscribed. Please CC me in answers.]

I did not read mail last month for multiple reasons, so I completely missed 
this discussion, but I would like to give my 0,02$ as well. The hat I'm 
wearing is that of the author of libtagaro, the soon-to-be libkdegames v2.0. 
(Not to be confused with Gluon, the other new KDE game development framework 
which is unrelated to the existing kdegames module.)

Mauricio Piacentini summarized our (kdegames team) position quite well: We 
want multi-channel output of preloaded sound samples. GluonAudio uses OpenAL 
for playback and libsndfile for audio file decoding. libsndfile only supports 
WAV, FLAC and OGG, but that's enough for the desktop gaming because the sounds 
come with the application, so the developer/designer can keep this restriction 
in mind when creating the sound effects.

TagaroAudio is also OpenAL/libsndfile-based, but hides all the complexity that 
OpenAL offers. It has only two classes, an AudioScene where you configure the 
listener (i.e. master volume and position - if you want positional playback), 
and a Sound class which loads a single sound file and can start multiple 
playbacks of it. For reference, code of TagaroAudio is at 
git.kde.org/libtagaro in the tagaro/audio directory. It's also used in 
kdegames by 4.6 Granatier (through a static source code copy).

This is what I consider our (=kdegames) needs. If I were to make a wishlist 
for Phonon or some other KDE multimedia API, I would like a synchronous 
decoding API for arbitrary sound files (to replace the libsndfile dependency) 
and multi-channel low latency playback ("low latency" as in: the guaranteed 
playback time should be mildly related to what the developer intended).

Greetings
Stefan