unity-design team mailing list archive

["frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx" <frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Mark, dead threads live longer, so i hear.. ;)

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?