[ILUG] multiple sound cards... I retract

[Caolan McNamara]

On Mon, Apr 23, 2001 at 08:52:28AM +0100, Paul J Collins wrote:
> >>>>> "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.

nas, while it existed was abandoned by ncd quite a while ago. The last version
they had is the one lingering at 1.2 patchlevel 5 on sunsite somewhere, its
more than three, maybe four or five years old.  To get it to compile back then
at least you needed to patch it again for linux.

http://www.csn.ul.ie/~caolan/Mods/nas-1.2sortofp6.html

Its big advantage was that it actually had an implementation in ncd's
XTerminals. And if the time hadn't been against them it might have caught on
as a de facto industry standard.

XAudio might also have gone somewhere, except there never was an implementation
as far as i know, as the wimpy unix corporations retreated from the desktop and
pulled the plug on X proper and dissappeared up their own bottoms with
broadway. I'd love to see a true reappearance of this with some backing behind
it. 

The problem I always saw with things like nas and esd et al, is that while they
generally worked. There never seemed to be input from true sound experts in
them. Get a couple of games folk into the mix to set out the kinds of latency
and features that they would need to have to make them use it.

Right now esd seems to work, so I'd like to see the wagons circle around that
one, don't know enough about the area to know if things like OpenAL from loki
are elements that should be part of a sound API and migrated into a single esd
based sound api and subsystem. As a factoid I heard a little blip a few days
ago that it isn't ideal under solaris, some kind of bad maximum sampling rate
detection.

And there was something called rplay as well, again don't know if it provided
much for a programmer to utilize, but its another offering to be aware of if
anyone is interested in examining the area.

Severe lack of audio tools under unix, could do with a lot more, some
professional gimp style audio tools. A serious audio application would in
the course of development quickly gather a list of requirements for audio
support.

C.
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