[Fedora-music-list] Thoughts on spin tools

[Brendan Jones]

Hi all,

I been thinking about what we need to do differentiate the audio spin 
from a just a collection of audio packages in addition to the spins we 
already have.

We really need some kind of UI or set of tools which tries to tie 
everything together, allowing for the coexistence of jack/pulseaudio (or 
not), multiple sound device configurations and context switching between 
audio and normal desktop use. I've mapping out such an application and 
in my travels have come across laditools [1] and kxstudio's cadence [2]. 
Good to see that there have been some recent efforts in this area. 
Perhaps we can leverage of these.

I'd be really keen to hear other peoples experiences using these tools. 
I'll start building them locally here when I have the time but 
personally haven't put them through their paces as yet.

We also need to collate all the tips and tricks we've all picked up 
along the way. Those that can be made generic we can ship in a 
fedora-audio-tools package. I'll set up a wiki page (in the next week or 
two) just to record these and we can collate them together later. Here 
I'm thinking alsa device settings, pulse scripts, qjackctl start/stop 
scripts: anything that people have had to create themselves to get their 
systems in a position to be productive for what they want to do.

Footnote: some people have made some very valid points to me regarding 
the audio spin w.r.t pulseaudio. I think if this project is going to be 
widely accepted we will need to cater for it. Having said that, I can 
see no reason why we can't ship a minimal audio spin as well, 
pulseaudio-less sitting on top of a very light DE. The aforementioned 
tools should ship with this as well.

regards,

Brendan


[1] http://repo.or.cz/w/laditools.git
[2] http://kxstudio.sourceforge.net/KXStudio:Applications:Cadence