From ultra-devel-owner@ultra.jcu.cz  Mon Feb 16 13:44:20 1998
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Date: Mon, 16 Feb 1998 13:44:08 +0100 (MET)
From: Andy Lo A Foe <arloafoe@cs.vu.nl>
To: ultra-devel@ultra.jcu.cz
Subject: Sign on (and test really :)
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Hi everyone,

Jaroslav, I'm 100% behind this project and I plan to constribute some
stuff, even if it's only user applications, to this great effort. But I'm
also looking into some lower level coding. 
One interesting project I have come along is SDL (Simple Direct Media
Layer), a generic low level driver library which provides access to I/O
devices which include audio:

http://www.devolution.com/~slouken/projects/SDL/

It has a very interesting API for audio. I'd like to see a similair
approach for the new Ultra Project drivers. Please let me know what you think.

One thing that's bothering me about the OSS (and generally the Unix) way
of doing audio output is the exclusiveness of the devices. Only one
application can access the audio device at a time. This is quite ok for
most uses, but it totally sucks if you want to something interesting with
audio. If for exmaple your window manager produces sound effects (i.e.
error beeps, etc) you can't use the sound device for something else. Some
apps have some kind of timeout where they release the device after x secs of
inactivity, ugh. Why not allow concurrent access to the DAC stream!?
Mixing of the data can be handled by the API lib or by the user program
itself. This could also be done for ADC. Let's discuss this IMHO exciting
feature ;-)

Andy

--
Andy Lo A Foe, arloafoe@cs.vu.nl | Linux v2.1.85 | "World domination.
http://www.cs.vu.nl/~arloafoe    |    BeOS PR    |  Fast." -- Linus
BeBox dual 133Mhz, BeDev: E-1516 | ICQ: 7472949  | IRC: Adnans


