Getting rid of pulseaudio? [was Re: Cannot play MP3 or OGG as ringtone on GTA02]

Joachim Steiger roh at openmoko.org
Fri Jul 25 18:50:38 CEST 2008


> Am Dienstag 22 Juli 2008 03:19:24 schrieb Russell Sears:
>> Michael 'Mickey' Lauer wrote:
> Well, pulseaudio is great. Honestly, I love the concept, that's why I pushed 
> it in to Openmoko in the first place. But alas, the current state is way 
> unusable on our slow systems. Perhaps this will improve with the new branch, 
> lets see. Until then, it's alsa dmix for me.

i agree. pulse needs to get better first.
still, dmix will bite us in the ass on the long run, since it has no
concept of anything but static buffers, can nor handle fullduplex audio,
or stream routing (its alsa after all).
means moving playing audio from the bt headset to the line-out will
never be possible with alsa only.

doesn't matter. still enough other stuff to get working first, and in
the end your apps should only use highlevel interfaces, and not need to
tamper with alsa-interfaces anyways. so it is transparent and your app
will do the same calls, regardless which underlying backend.

>> Also, is GStreamer definitely in the future?  I'm looking into
>> fixed-point graphic equalizers; gstreamer seems to be a good place to
>> add one.
> 
> Absolutely. GStreamer is great and will be a vital part of the Openmoko 
> framework.

ack ;)

>> The choices for adding new audio processing code seem to be adding a
>> plugin to gstreamer, alsa or pulseaudio.
> 
> If you want to maximize performance, go alsa. If you want to maximize reusing, 
> go GStreamer.
> 

since alsa is hw-abstraction only, not stream routing, not stream
processing (besides of in and output) and doesn't have any sane
framework for stuff like equalizers (or any software based signal
processing) i would recommend gstreamer for that.

alsa should stay what it is. a driver framework.
adding more layering violations doesn't help (and would hinder pushing
stuff upstream in the long run)


-- 

Joachim Steiger
Openmoko Central Services




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