[pulseaudio-discuss] System-wide daemon howto/best practices

[Jan Kasprzak]

Lennart Poettering wrote:
: Inside RH we had a few disucssions how to handle multi-seat setups
: with regards to audio best. Our conclusion was that audio cards should
: be treated similar to mice and keyboards: i.e. each seat gets its own
: pair of boxes (or a headphone) and they are not shared with anyone
: else. OTOH I see how sharing a sound card would be handy.

	Well, I am thinking about (not only) sharing a sound card,
but possibly splitting the (multi-channel) sound card output
to two or more "virtual sound cards", and letting each user
have his own two audio channels. This could be done better
with a system-wide daemon which would handle only mixing the two
inputs to the 4-channel sound card, and maybe a per-user daemon
with other goodies (such as storing the stream volume and name pairs).

: So in
: the end we might end up with the optional solution of running a
: tiny/dumbed-down pa system instance which sessions connect to. But
: that's way down on my TODO list, and will always stay optional since
: it is detrimental for latency.

	How bad the latency increase may be for adding another "upstream"
daemon? Would it still be usable for the interactive communication
like ekiga?

	Thanks,

-Yenya

-- 
| Jan "Yenya" Kasprzak  <kas at {fi.muni.cz - work | yenya.net - private}> |
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| http://www.fi.muni.cz/~kas/    Journal: http://www.fi.muni.cz/~kas/blog/ |
**         Those who fail to understand communication protocols,          **
**         are doomed to repeat them over port 80.    -- from /.          **