Funny you should mention those, and slightly surprising that you never encountered them.bw123 wrote:I never heard of the other projects ESD or aRts
Back before ALSA, there was a need for a universal sound-mixing daemon that would allow multiple applications to play audio at the same time. The Enlightenment desktop, GNOME, and a bunch of unrelated applications used ESD, and KDE used ARTS.
Both sucked, for many of the same reasons pulseaudio sucks, because it's pretty much the same square-wheel with more features and a better API.
It's fascinating, in a slightly horrifying way, how history repeats itself.
Sound servers are not the answer, they've never been the answer. If the kernel (ALSA) API doesn't do what is needed, effort is better spent improving it than writing yet another latency-introducing, resource-sucking, overengineered uber-daemon.
If one needs to do properly arcane things with audio (AKA pro-audio virtual mixing and mastering) that can't reasonably be done in kernel space, JACK (with realtime kernel patches) already does everything one could ask for.