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

[Kevin Kofler]

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. :-(

> Arts should not be used by anything at all. Let it die a peaceful
> death please. (But I a m bit ignorant of KDE, so maybe I am stepping 
> on someone's toes by saying something bad bad about arts like that)

aRts is just used by legacy stuff, it definitely should not be used by
anything new.

        Kevin Kofler