OpenGL 3.1 Released Plus New Audio Standard

[zhark]

You mean this? I can't stop laughing when I look at it. It's big, chaotic, steaming pile of crap :P

http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/linuxaudio.png

Thats just sad

[elanthis]

That audio tech chart is bullcrap. I could make a significantly more complex chart for almost any technology, because that chart includes driver architectures, low-level sound APIs, and high-level platform toolkits.

Driver architectures: OSS, ALSA.
pushes bits to the sound card from the user-supplied sound buffers.

Low-level APIs: OSS, ALSA, OpenAL.
userspace APIs for managing sound buffers, hardware devices, and basic effects/processing.

Sound servers: ESD, JACK, PulseAudio.
userspace sound mixing, network transparency.

High-level APIs: Gstreamer, Phonon.
advanced sound buffer management and advanced effects.

Toolkit-specific APIs: SDL, Allegro, GNOME's.
essentially just pathetic wrappers around the high-level APIs, made mostly for portability between OSes.

The only thing that makes it even remotely confusing is that several of the low-level APIs can also be used on top of the higher-level APIs. e.g., you can use the ALSA API to talk to PulseAudio, and an OSS wrapper over ALSA was made. This kind of crap only exists because old apps were coded directly against a low-level API instead of against a high-level API, so hacks had to be added to make those old apps go through the normal audio stream.

The audio chart could be draw in a FAR cleaner manner, though. The artist that rendered it was either trolling or was just flat out incompetent at drawing flow charts.

[KellyClowers]

That audio tech chart is bullcrap. I could make a significantly more complex chart for almost any technology, because that chart includes driver architectures, low-level sound APIs, and high-level platform toolkits.

That was my first thought.

The audio chart could be draw in a FAR cleaner manner, though. The artist that rendered it was either trolling or was just flat out incompetent at drawing flow charts.

Well, what do you expect from the adobe flash guys?

[srg_13]

You mean this? I can't stop laughing when I look at it. It's big, chaotic, steaming pile of crap :P

http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/linuxaudio.png

Are you kidding? The only reason it looks complicated is because the upper level abstractions (GStreamer, OpenAL, etc.) support a lot of lower level sound systems - but a lot of the APIs and sound systems are depreciated now.

If you take away the ones nobody uses (Allegro, Arts, ESD, ClanLib (I think - it's the only one I've not heard of) and OSS) it's actually fairly simple...

Pretty much, all the hardware stuff is managed by Alsa (or Jack if you're interested in higher end audio), and then there are a few different APIs that developers can choose to use.

[benmoran]

Agreed. Pretty devious attempt to make things more confusing then they actually are. When I first switched to Linux completely, it took me about 5 minutes of research to understand the sound options.

[Redeeman]

not to mention that on Linux, if something merely exists, it simply HAS to add to the "jungle"..

ill bet you if i wrote 10 new different sound servers and audio decoding/output libaries, the mongers that dont understand anything would instantly use them in their "linux audio is a mess!!!!! rampage"

[unimatrix]

You mean this? I can't stop laughing when I look at it. It's big, chaotic, steaming pile of crap :P

http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/linuxaudio.png

Here's a more realistic picture:
http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/121855/pu...inux_audio.png

[benmoran]

That's looking more realistic.

Would it be appropriate to have PulseAudio even with libao and Gstreamer? Or have the arrows enter it from the side? A lot of apps support it directly now, and in this chart it looks like it can't be accessed directly.

[kraftman]

You mean this? I can't stop laughing when I look at it. It's big, chaotic, steaming pile of crap :P

http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/linuxaudio.png

I can't stop laughing when I look at it, because it just shows how adobe guys are lame.

[unimatrix]

That's looking more realistic.

Would it be appropriate to have PulseAudio even with libao and Gstreamer? Or have the arrows enter it from the side? A lot of apps support it directly now, and in this chart it looks like it can't be accessed directly.

Here's the .flw file (made using Kivio): http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/121855/pu...inux_audio.flw
Feel free to improve it.