[polypaudio-discuss] Audio ideas and an introduction

[Shahms King]

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Hello all,

While the sound situation under Linux is improving, due in no small part
to the efforts of this project and other like ALSA, there are still a
good number of areas where it could be improved.  In working towards
that goal, I have some things which I'd like to implement within
pulseaudio, specifically relating to "hotplug".  I originally had some
of these ideas just prior to the "we're not dead" release of polypaudio
and that announcement along pulseaudio's growing momentum, both in terms
of development and community interest are very exciting as it's that
much less work I have to do :-).

As part of a course I'm taking on open source development this summer,
I'd like to (finally) implement some of these ideas and get feedback on
the feasibility and acceptability of some of them.  As I see it, there
are a number of parts that need to be implemented to get hotplug of
audio devices (think USB audio) working seamlessly.

First is hal integration.  Although not strictly necessary, it's "low
hanging fruit" and would obviate the /proc parsing within module-detect
while allowing for cleanly loading and unloading modules upon device
addition and removal.

Second, a module similar to module-combine that handles (slave) device
addition and removal sanely, rather than unloading itself when any of
the slave modules in unloaded.  There are a number of different
possibilities for this, but my current thinking is a module that listens
for new sinks to be added and adds sinks matching a configurable pattern
as slaves.

Those two are the low-hanging fruit that I can likely at least get
started in the amount of time I have.  The others basically consist of:
moving clients between sinks, reconfiguring existing sinks, and more
fully exploiting the capabilities of the hardware where appropriate.
Ideally, I'll have patches implementing modules for hal integration and
hopefully 'autocombine' by the end of the summer and would mainly like
to get your thoughts on the acceptability of said modules for upstream
inclusion...

Thanks,

- --
Shahms E. King <shahms at shahms.com>
Multnomah ESD

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