[Gambas-user] Article

[optimus]

On Wednesday 22 October 2003 8:23 pm, danielcampos at ...282... wrote:

> 1) Sound in Linux is a very obscure world. There are al least
> two kind of kernel drivers (OSS,  Alsa), there are lot of
> sound servers (Arts and ESound are the most known), lot of
> mixers, etc. May be SDL is good option to enable sound on Gambas,
> but we should be sure it is compatible with, at least the more
> common sound subsystems in Linux (I really mean, Linux, FreeBSD, etc),
> and I don't kwnow if it is true at this moment. About Linux sound problems,
> for instance, I usually play DVDs with Xine (unencrypted, of course :), and
> some days sound goes OK, some days I have to stop Arts first... randomly,
> may be sound is still an unstable world on Linux (or may be it is problem
> of Mandrake and RedHat, I'm not sure)

OSS is going to be deprecated in kernel 2.6. 2.6 will offer full support for 
ALSA.

Sound has a very definite roadmap in Linux, as opposed to graphics. 
Preemptible kernel patches have been incorporated in 2.5, laying the 
groundwork for the development of a real-time OS framework for sound. jackit 
and LADSPA are two of these efforts that seems to point the way to the future 
of audio in Linux.

> 2) Midi : lot of PCI cards has still a bad midi support on Linux,
> however there are emultators, like timidity, that "parses" midi
> into wav, that are quite useful to play midis on not supported cards,
> Gambas sound developers should  care about this fact to let more people use
> Gambas-midi programs.

Device detection and configuration are more mature in 2.6. This could help 
improve support for PCI MIDI devices on Linux.
http://www.kniggit.net/wwol26.html

I'd love to see a Gambas program with more functionality than Cakewalk Audio 
Pro ;-). If only I know how to program (sigh...)



optimus