On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 09:53:53PM +0200, Marc Espie wrote: > On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 07:01:28AM +0000, Jacob Meuser wrote: > > can we please just accept that a "100% perfect for everyone" solution > > is not really possible? > > Of course not, that way lies mediocrity. ;-)
should aucat server be transparent or not? I mean, should it be obvious to the user that something is different with the audio system just because aucat server is running, when just playing a single stream? currently, it is transparent. if aucat lowered the volume when even a single stream is playing, then it would no longer be transparent. so how does that fit with "the element of least surprise"? the difference is when more than one stream is playing concurrently. without aucat server, the successive attempts to play streams fail. with aucat running, there is no (hard) failure. so, this is/can not be transparent. imo, the fact that other OS's sound systems don't try to avoid saturation/clipping when more than one stream is playing sucks balls because that means that it is left to the user to adjust volumes to avoid saturation/clipping. other people apparently have different opinions about this. but I know for a fact that many ports do not have software volume control, which means that users cannot easily change volumes to avoid saturation/clipping. it is possible to change volumes of individual clients in aucat itself, but how many people are aware of this? I suspect very few. and even if they are aware of this, it requires another application to do this, which is even less "just works by default". it makes perfect sense to me that 'aucat -i file.wav -i file.wav -i file.wav -i file.wav' sounds the same as 'aucat -i file.wav' instead of saturated/clipped garbage. why should it matter whether 'file.wav' is being read from a file or from a socket? that's ultimately the difference between aucat the client and aucat the server. more to the point: OpenBSD's audio is a bit less sucky than it used to be. the people who want to change the way aucat works are not the people who made audio less sucky. I think the EPOCH shit in ports is totally fucked, but my opinion doesn't really matter, because I'm not a major contributor to ports. I can accept that. at least with aucat there are options to make it work to suit differing opinions/ tastes. -- jake...@sdf.lonestar.org SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org
