Confusion over audio device enumeration

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Michael Pyne at 23/09/09 21:33 did gyre and gimble:
> Well aRts had a bad reputation for being unmaintained and thus generally 
> useless if it didn't work.  I seem to remember a quote about PulseAudio "being 
> the software that breaks your sound" from its earlier days ;)

Probably not from that long ago :p In particular the timer based 
scheduling core released in 0.9.11 which wasn't that long ago generally 
broke a lot of things due to the underlying limitations of alsa (pulse 
using bleeding edge features no other alsa client implementation had 
used before). But the true blame of where the problem is doesn't matter 
generally, as it was "caused by pulseaudio". I'm not complaining here as 
it's a pretty obvious conclusion to come to and if I didn't know better 
myself I would have done the same :D

> It's hard to recover from a reputation.

Indeed... I painted everyone in my village's fence, but do they call me 
Colin the fence painter? I fixed everyone in my village's car, but do 
they call me Colin the mechanic? You shag one damn sheep.... :p

> As far as backends I prefer for phonon-gst to work myself (and I say this as 
> somehow who simply hates and abhors gobject and glib more and more every time 
> I use it -- I mean no offense when I say that, but meh...). 

I have no really comment on gobject or qobject myself. Each time I use 
either, I generally just have to sit with the docs open and bundle 
through... Jack of all trades master of none. On the plus side, it means 
I don't hate either :p


> gstreamer is designed for audio output 

Well it's designed for audio output and input. This is an asymmetry in 
the xine backend that's always puzzled me... (although the gstreamer 
backend doesn't seem to support input either in it's current state, at 
least it *can* be made to do so fairly easily!).

> I look forward to Phonon and PulseAudio being highly compatible though, which 
> I think would be great for Linux audio in general.

Cool, thanks for the support :)

Take care

Col

-- 

+------------------------+
|     Colin Guthrie      |
+------------------------+
| http://colin.guthr.ie/ |
+------------------------+