Re: NSSound and gsnd

[Yen-Ju Chen]

 I don't prefer any library at all.
 But if considering the GNUstep DESKTOP in the future,
 people will need to play the CD-ROM,
 play at least some audio format (wav, ogg),
 play movie, rip music CD, burn CD, ...
 To achive these, you need:
 a CD-ROM library: libcdaudio, or SDL;
 wav, aiff, snd format library: audiofile, libsndfile, SDL_sound;
 ogg format library: libvorbis (SDL_sound can use it, too);
 audio output: portaudio, libao, or SDL;
 video output (not decoder): SDL;
 video decoder: xine (maybe).
 ...

 It is obvious that SDL offer an almost all-in-one solution.
 But it also contains something GNUstep will never use,
 such as SDL_thread, SDL_timer, SDL_event.

 Gnome use about 50 libraries/programs, and KDE about 25.
 If there is a list of GNUstep prefered libraries to use,
 it will help people to develope GNUstep application by
 using these prefered libraries.

 Yen-Ju

       On Thu, 1 Aug 2002 13:24:17 +0300 (EEST)
        Enrico Sersale <<EMAIL: PROTECTED>> wrote:
        [...]
        > If you want to see an example of sound class that plays from a
stream,
        > take a look at the MusicKit. I think that it does exactly wath you
want.
        [...]

        As far as I remember, Nextstep had a SoundKit included. Wouldn't it
make
        sense to have something similar, maybe even the MusicKit, to prevent
people
        from using all kinds of different libraries? I've noticed several
(well, ok,
        just two) applications for GNUstep already, one using libvorbis, the
other
        SDL_sound, accessing those directly.

        SDL_sound needs libvorbis to work. See
http://www.icculus.org/SDL_sound/
        "It is meant to make the programmer's sound playback tasks simpler".


        If GNUstep had a predefined "API" for sound, you could specify the
lib you
        want or need to use during installation of "sound kit". Developers
would
        only have to stick to that API, and users wouldn't have to worry
about
        installing different sound-libs for each application.

        I do agree in a certain way.

        The example of libvorbis and SDL_sound is bad because SDL_because,
as I wrote juste before, it needs libvorbis.
        So, the users have always to install libvorbis... ;-) The interest
is here only for the programmer.

        But It could be good that gnustep had an official sound API that
faces most of sound needs of gnustep users.

        I would like to say that we have to take care about the choice of
such a tool in relation with the matter of licenses.
        Mp3 is a good example.
        I mean, I wonder if I have to add the mp3 support to Encod.app or
not because of this matter of license. I know that If Encod.app supports
mp3, Encod.app will never be in debian distributions, so a great number of
people will not install it as easily as gnumail or gorm for example.

        So ... in order to choose such a tool we have to define if we want
to support all kind of sound files .... or not.

        IMHO, we have "to help" people by supporting a limited number  of
sound formats that are in the spirit of gnustep.

        Stef



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