[ILUG] multiple sound cards... I retract

[Paul J Collins]

>>>>> "PJ" == Paul Jakma <paul at jakma.org> writes:

    PJ> Some X terminals support NAS, Network Audio
    PJ> System. (particularly NCD X-terms). And NAS is supported on
    PJ> many many Unixes, i remember a lot of games way way back used
    PJ> NAS for audio. Now i'm trying to think why the fsck the gnome
    PJ> people had to go and invent esd... did they not know of NAS?

You can blame Rasterman and his merry band for that; they started the
ESD project ("Enlightened Sound Daemon"), and I guess GNOME used it
"because it was there", like they did with MICO.  MICO has since been
replaced; perhaps ESD will be too.

I believe the original intent was that ESD was to be purely used for
triggering short samples, such as for window-manager sound schemes.

Personally, I'd like a version of ESD that left /dev/dsp alone and
used the SoundFont stuff in Creative's newer cards to trigger samples
via MIDI, but most cards come with too little RAM as standard for
that to be a good solution for most people.

-- 
"Weaseling out of things is what separates us from the 
 animals ... except the weasel."
	-- Emad El-Haraty