Re: NSSound

[David Chisnall]

On 3 Jun 2009, at 13:34, Stefan Bidigaray wrote:

> I just wrote a really long list of stuff I dislike about having  
> gnustep_sndd and using OpenAL instead of portaudio, but I decided  
> not to send that.  Really, I think the most compeling reason that I  
> went with OpenAL is for how simple it is, and it's cross- 
> platformness (that's right, new word :) ), not to mention we're just  
> re-inventing the wheel by having our own sound server... ALSA, OSS,  
> winmm, CoreAudio all already implement software mixing with a lot  
> more features and optimization that gnustep_sndd.  Why have our own,  
> prone to bugs since very few people use it, when we can use the  
> native OS's version?

Couldn't agree more.  Portaudio kind-of works on Linux, occasionally  
works on other platforms, and is a buggy mess.  The only reason to  
have any kind of sound server is that the OS doesn't support mixing at  
the driver level, and so having a separate sound server per toolkit is  
completely pointless.  At the moment, sound playback in Mélodie, which  
uses OSS directly, works on more of the machines I've tried it on than  
simple NSSounds going 'bing' and this is clearly far from ideal.

OpenAL is well-supported and is a relatively simple API.  It's a far  
better choice than PortAudio.  Ideally, we should have an interface in  
-back that used the host platform's native APIs (OSS, ALSA,  
DirectShow, CoreAudio, etc) directly, but doing this is a massive  
amount of work for very little gain.

David