Re: play-sound-file & esd

[Richard Stallman]

    > I just wrote some code for my jabber client to play sounds
    > asynchronously

I didn't notice the word "asynchronously" when I responded before.
Sorry.

    I guess we need to add async sound playing in the future.  But then you 
have 
    to add a cancel-sound as well.

This might be useful to do in the future, after the release.  I don't
think that having a cancel-sound function is a high cost.

David Kastrup wrote:

    I'd prefer if we could use native interfaces for that.  The main
    application I would see for sound within Emacs would be
    WYHIWYG-editing of lilypond files and other sound describing programs.
    Starting one process for each auditory feedback seems like overkill.
    One would rather want to keep a device/socket/pipe open, and ALSA
    appears like the most basic access method with a free future: you can
    pretty much rely on its presence on current GNU/Linux systems.

I agree.

    So in order of urgency, one would probably implement:

    a) play through a pipe and a command line app started once
    b) play through native ALSA

I think we won't really need (a) if we have (b).