[ltp] Sound Daemon

[Ross Burton]

On Sat, 2003-10-11 at 20:30, Marius Gedminas wrote:
> I heard that aRts was technically superior and that GNOME plans to drop
> esound and switch to aRts as well.  But I don't track those things
> closely.

No, aRts and esound are totally different -- esound is a simple
multiplexer for the sound card, so that multiple processes can talk to
esound, and that mixes them into a single connection to the sound card.

aRts is a full-on synthesiser and playback library, and is larger than
esound. In my opinion aRts is a total overkill when a simple mixer is
required, but then esound is also pretty poor. Personally I use the ALSA
drivers so esound is largely redundant.

GNOME is planning on dropping esound in the long-term, but switching to
gstreamer, which allows arbitary output devices.  If/When the switch to
gstreamer occurs, I'd say the majority of people would either carry on
using esound to allow multiple accesses to the sound card, or use the
ALSA drivers directly which allow this too on capable cards.

Ross
-- 
Ross Burton                                 mail: ross@burtonini.com
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