PulseAudio and sound apps (was: Re: Orphaning a few packages)

[Lennart Poettering]

On Fri, 17.04.09 19:22, Callum Lerwick (seg at haxxed.com) wrote:

> On Wed, 2009-04-15 at 18:26 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> > Lennart Poettering wrote:
> > > JACK should not be used by anything by default, with the exception of
> > > audio production software.
> > 
> > The problem there is: where does "desktop software" stop and "audio
> > production software" start? For example, Audacity (which thankfully
> > supports PulseAudio these days, and BTW it also supports JACK) is used by
> > many users who are not audio professionals, yet it is arguably also "audio
> > production software" (though I guess real professionals will find it too
> > newbieish ;-) ). It's set up for PulseAudio by default (and before that it
> > was trying to use OSS by default - yuck!). A tool like qsynth is also an
> > interesting example: that's a frontend for a MIDI software synthesizer. It
> > can be used to just play MIDIs or it can be used for audio production.
> > Right now its Fedora package is set up for JACK by default, though it can
> > be set to use ALSA (and then works just fine with the PulseAudio ALSA
> > plugin). What should those tools do? Try to autodetect what server is
> > running? As long as we have mutually exclusive sound servers, there will
> > probably always be tools which do the wrong thing by default. :-(
> 
> If the user hasn't set a preference, such as on the first run, use Jack
> if it's running, otherwise fall back on Pulse, otherwise fall back on
> ALSA. Easy. There should be a simple obvious UI (Not hidden in the !@#
> $ing preferences) that clearly indicates the current output and allows
> you to dynamically change the output if it chooses wrong, with a sticky
> preference for the next time.

It's not that easy. There's autospawning of both PA and Jack. Hence
checking 'if it is running' doesn't really work.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net         ICQ# 11060553
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