[ale] GNOME hogs /dev/dsp

[hirsch at zapmedia.com]

James P. Kinney III writes:
 > ESD may not be the best _sounding_ sound processor, but it can handle
 > multiple sounds streams at once which is seriously cool.

Anyone know of a maintainer for ESD?  I have changes that can
radically improve sound quality, but have not been able to send them
anywhere.

ESD has two sound quality issues.  The first, is that ESD tends to
ignore return values that specify how many bytes are being processed;
it just uses the default values.  So if fewer than the expected number
are, say, read, it will still send the expected number to the sound
device.  This, of course, sounds bad.  If you have reason to believe
that you will always be sending the expected amount of data, this bug
should not affect you.

Second, if it mixes two sound streams of different sample rates, it
does the worst passible resampling to creat two sound streams of the
same sample rate.  To down-sample is just drops samples.  To up-sample
it just duplicates bytes.  Either one of these is guaranteed to be
audible.  Doing this right is tricky, but even doing some kind of
linear interpolation would sound better than ESD.  If you never expect
to mix sample of different sample rates, this bug should not affect you.

--Michael

 > On Mon, 2002-04-08 at 18:13, Kevin Krumwiede wrote:
 > > On Mon, 2002-04-08 at 18:05, Steven A. DuChene wrote:
 > > > How about changing the configuration of XMMS to use esd instead of fight
 > > > with it?
 > > 
 > > Dangit, why you gotta make sense like that?
 > > 
 > > Anyway, thanks.  I installed xmms-esd and it works.  Even better, system
 > > sounds can still be heard while xmms is playing MP3s, which can't be
 > > said for Windows and WinAmp, AFAIK.  Hooray for Linux!
 > > 
 > > Krum
 > > 
 > > 
 > > ---
 > > This message has been sent through the ALE general discussion list.
 > > See http://www.ale.org/mailing-lists.shtml for more info. Problems should be 
 > > sent to listmaster at ale dot org.
 > > 




---
This message has been sent through the ALE general discussion list.
See http://www.ale.org/mailing-lists.shtml for more info. Problems should be 
sent to listmaster at ale dot org.