On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 13:49, Mark Shuttleworth
<mark@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
A major problem we have with sound events, classically, is latency.
allow me to add that plops and clicks interrupt the playback of music in rhythmbox, if i use the window controls too rapidly.. i can't even make a difference between the error-plop sound and the actual sound played by the sound theme upon "minimize" or "maximize"
Didn't Andrew Morton maintain a series of kernel patches designed to make linux more reliable concerning realtime audio?
Perhaps somebody has a technical explanation for why audio playback is so unstable in Linux!?
The best counterexample was BeOS, which was a so-called Real Time Operating System. Nothing could shake, break or disturb the playback of sound and video, no matter how hard i tried shaking windows and multitasking etc (of a liveCD on a 350MHz processor with 512MB RAM!!).
I was always hoping for linux to become that stable one day...
You click, and half a second later the bell goes. That makes the sound theme
feel arbitrary and cheap. Let's work out how to make it feel real and
immediate, which means cutting latency out, not putting more in.
Could this be a kernel and ALSA issue, or is PulseAudio creating new reliability problems here?
I have the feeling that linux audio was far more reliable, stable and real-time before the introduction of PulseAudio.
Sound is certainly an area where less will be more :-)
Let's start by thinning out the use cases of "audio notification".
Where i would like to have audio notifications:
* incoming chat message
* incoming email
* incoming phone call
* battery low
* device connected physically
* storage device mounted
* storage device unmounted (ready for safe removal)
* application frozen
* application exit upon error
where i don't want audio notification:
* window opened
* window closed
* window minimized
* window maximized
* window hidden to systray icon
* window restored from systray icon
any more ideas on this?