Re: FC3 wishlist - sound server

[Mike Hearn <mike navi cx>]

On Wed, 07 Jul 2004 12:20:24 +0200, Peter Backlund wrote:
> Any program that supports ALSA output also supports DMIX. In the
> attached setup, the default device is set to DMIX. But as you said,
> legacy applications only supporting OSS won't be able to use DMIX.

You can use the aoss wrapper to force OSS apps to go via alsalib, iirc.

This uses LD_PRELOAD so it has to be done on a case by case basis. In
theory it could be applied to all apps but I suspect it works by
overriding open() and similar calls, so it'd have to be very carefully
tested and the common case would have to be high performance.

For the non-networked case, that would make things Just Work for everyone,
as far as I can see.

For the networked case, well, this is still an open question. I quite like
the idea of an ALSA plugin that simply spits the audio out into a
userspace forwarder daemon which does the mixing itself before sending the
mixed stream to the remote machine. That way there is no API confusion:
alsalib is *the* sound API for all but pro audio apps that need to use
JACK anyway.

Such a plugin does not yet exist, AFAIK.

thanks -mike