[pulseaudio-discuss] [RoarAudio] Anyone heard of RoarAudio?

[Philipp Schafft]

reflum,

I'm very sorry about the late reply. Currently all the devels are on
holiday.


On Fri, 2010-08-06 at 10:10 +0300, Tanu Kaskinen wrote:
> On Thu, 2010-08-05 at 12:45 +0100, Colin Guthrie wrote:
> > 'Twas brillig, and Colin Guthrie at 05/08/10 12:16 did gyre and gimble:
> > > It's not really clear to me what it is or what it is trying to do over
> > > and above PulseAudio's capabilities:
> > > 
> > > http://roaraudio.keep-cool.org/
> > 
> > Having looked a little beyond the marketing fluff, it seems to me to be
> > totally lacking in almost all regard!
> 
> Totally lacking in almost all regard? Using what criteria? To me it
> looks like RoarAudio provides a respectable amount of features.
> 
> Anyway, I would also like to hear about the goals of the RoarAudio
> developers. Since to my knowledge there has been about zero
> communication between these two projects, I doubt I'll get any answers
> from pulseaudio-discuss, so I'll cross-post this to the RoarAudio
> mailing list.
> 
> I found this in the manual:
> 
> "It is designed to replace the very old sound server Enlightened Sound
> Daemon (EsounD) and add modern features as well as features needed by
> Radio and TV Stations. This includes support for Web Streaming via
> Icecast and simular software."

This is a very old description. It is still true but not complet
anymore.

> (I think this should be on the front page of the project web site.)
> According to that description the goals are to be Gnome's chosen sound
> system and also to be the best system for radio/tv station web
> streaming.

> I don't see much point in the first goal (I believe
> PulseAudio was a fine ESD replacement already two years ago when the
> first release of RoarAudio was made), but the web streaming part sounds
> sensible.

Here is a bit from the project history, maybe this make this more clear:
Some friends and I was working on a project to do a live WebTV show. I
do not talk about a bit streaming with a webcam but about real TV. We
hit some problems and was looking for a solutions. One of them was about
audio. We was searching and researching a lot things and found that we
need support for some features in something like a sound server. I was
looking at all sound servers which existed at thet time and no one has
fitted. So I looked at the internals to find out which one was most
close so I can just write some patches. This worked out to be a very
hard task. In the end we decided to write RoarAudio based on some
concepts because it was more easy then 'transforming' any existing one
into what we need.

The refrence to ESD is just because at the beginning it looked much like
an improved ESD. Nowadays this is no longer true: RoarAudio does not
share more things with ESD as with every other sound server, too.

The streaming part is still a strong one, but is not the only one.
Another very importent aspect of the project for example is that it is
the most compatible sound system AFAIK. So it is very likely you can use
it with any client even if it does not have any RoarAudio plugin or
something.

> So, how do you, RoarAudio people, see the role of all the various sound
> servers on Linux? My view is that PulseAudio is the best solution for
> general desktop use, while Jack is very good for music production (and
> many other "pro-audio" use cases). Do you agree? Would RoarAudio then be
> the best choice for streaming live content on the web?

I agree that RoarAudio is better for advanced users. But it works out of
the box with no configureation like all other. Also there is for example
µRoarD which is a small RoarAudio server which is very nice for simple
use cases (you can not break because it's a very simple one,...).

The other sound systems have diffrent design goals, so they may be
better for some use cases. But in gernal I think RA is become very
general.

Hope this mail answers some questions, if you still have some, don't
hesitate to ask or join us on IRC or our mailinglist if details
discussion is needed.

-- 
Philipp.
 (Rah of PH2)
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