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

[Lennart Poettering]

On Wed, 15.04.09 18:26, Kevin Kofler (kevin.kofler at chello.at) 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. :-(

Of course you have to make a decision somewhere. You cannot make
everyone happy. So pick the one you believe would make sense to the
largest audience and make it easy to swtch to the other backend. And
also keep in mind that the normal desktop users are probably not as
technically versed as the pro audio folks are. 

Lennart

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