[gst-devel] JACK and GStreamer, from the horse's mouth

[Benjamin Otte]

On Fri, 24 Nov 2006, Paul Davis wrote:

> right. when i was at OSDL's DAM-1 meeting, i urged several people to
> forget about specific existing solutions (such as JACK, which several
> attendees wanted to see adopted as "the sound server") and instead to
> focus on programming APIs that were constructuted to facilitate using
> any one of several sane backends. in short, a pull model that would
> allow easy use of CoreAudio/JACK/WDM/ASIO/EASI and other similar styles
> of audio programming.
>
You know, when I write an audio application, I use OSS first. Why? Because
with OSS I can do open(), write(), close() and that's all I need to know.
And it works.
That's why people like OSS so much. It's simple and works. So every app
under the sun can output to OSS. Same for ESD.

We all agree that both OSS and ESD suck. But they have a super-simple API
that works most of the time. So people are happy when they start with
their project and use them. And as long as it works, there's no need to
reengineer stuff.

Last time I wanted to use JACK (actually for writing a GStreamer plugin),
I had to know about threads, callbacks and whatnot. You're making it
really HARD to use your stuff. And for all I care, it doesn't buy me
anything. So I decided I don't care a single bit. Unless you bait me with
a dead simple API, I won't care.
And you will probably have to write your plugin yourself.

Cheers,
Benjamin