[gst-devel] Linux audio is a mess? [was: JACK and GStreamer, from the horse's mouth]

[Paul Davis]

On Wed, 2006-11-29 at 16:05 -0800, Erik Walthinsen wrote:

its great that you'll be at DAM-3, even if i agree that its likely to be
not terribly productive. 

my main generic comment on your post - its a response i had to several
sections of it - is that although i suspect you actually don't make this
confusion when pushed, you frequently miss out on the fact that
gstreamer is an entirely intra-application framework that has nothing to
say about inter-application data routing. comments about scheduling, for
example, are close to meaningless from a gstreamer perspective: the
scheduling that messes things up exists outside of gstreamer's control
(in the kernel).

gstreamer excites me at the same time as being slightly irrelevant for
my own needs. i view gstreamer and JACK as two sides of the same coin:
advancing the unix model into the realtime streaming media world.
gstreamer does this within applications by making it possible to build
complex pipelines easily; JACK does this between applications (and audio
interfaces) by making it possible to build complex app-level pipelines
easily. the technology required to do these two tasks is quite
different, and i hope they remain that way.

i don't believe that an application such as ardour could or even should
be built around a framework like gstreamer, but jokosher may prove me
wrong on that. i *am* excited by the idea of using gstreamer to handle
some of ardour's more peripheral streaming media needs, but i can't
consider that until gstreamer is multi-platform, which doesn't seem high
on the priority list of anyone. in the meantime, the fabulous work that
wim is doing on JACK elements for gstreamer points the way toward a
tighter integration of these two worlds that can only be productive.

lets talk more at DAM-3 about how to talk more, if you see what i mean.